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Huike Wen

In her home country of China, Huike Wen received her B.A. and a M.A. in Ancient Chinese Civilization. She completed her second M.A. in Asian Language and Literature and received her Ph.D. in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa. At Willamette University, Huike teaches Gender and Mass Communication in China, Media and Society in China, Media, Consumption and Culture, and Chinese language classes at various levels.

Because of her education in both China and the US, Huike has a broad academic interest that covers history, literature, and communication studies. She is interested in studying the interaction of global, regional, and local cultural productions and circulations from the perspectives of critical media theory, media history, and gender studies. Huike’s Ph.D. dissertation examined how television sets were introduced and represented in Chinese mainstream newspaper and leisure magazines in the 1980s, which reflects both the joy and fear of Chinese intellectuals to the new media and capitalism productions and culture. She has published in the Journal of Communication Inquiry, and various Chinese academic journals, such as Journal of Sichuan University, Journal of Southwest University for Nationalities, and Light Vehicles. She has authored the “Auto Forum” discussing auto culture for Sohu.com, one of the two largest Chinese internet portals. She has also contributed to Chinese Reading World, an online reading practice system designed for Chinese learners. Besides a book manuscript with Roman and Littlefield Publishing Group on the introduction of TV to China in the 1980s, Huike is currently working on several projects: one examines the illusion of a diversified masculinity created by the capitalization, competition and censorship of Chinese TV industry; another uses Dwelling Narrowness (Wo Ju), a popular Chinese television drama, as an example to investigate how the cultural hegemony and self-censorship of Chinese media cannot fully expose the complexity of love and relationship; the last project studies how media industry uses “history” and “love” to create a virtual space for cultural communication and consumption in East Asia and its impact on gender construction in present-day China.

Prior to coming to Willamette, Huike had taught courses on media and communication theory, gender, race and class in media, rhetoric and public speaking at the University of Iowa and taught Chinese, as a foreign language, at the University of Iowa, Beloit College and Middlebury College. During her free time, she enjoys hiking and interesting conversations.