Weiling Deng

Biography

Dr. Weiling Deng is an Assistant Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies at Champlain College. She currently serves as the Core Division’s Third Year Faculty Lead and helps develop the new curriculum of Digital Humanities. Weiling received her Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Comparative Education from UCLA. Her research and teaching interests centrally address “a world in flux,” the ever-lasting, AI-infiltrated reality in which education, art, technology, and relationship are embedded. Weiling writes and teaches about Global Asias, Urban Humanities, panoramic and immersive media, generative education, higher education organizational change, gender and feminist studies, technology and race. Drawing from theorists like John Dewey and Paulo Freire, Weiling is dedicated to place-based international education through experiences of immigration, diaspora, border, and urban space.

Weiling is currently working on her first book project, titled Illuminating the Shadows of the Undead: Panoramic Fabulation of Transpacific Chinese Scenes. The book focuses on the speculative cinematic connections between Hollywood and Shanghai, Shenyang, and Beijing by way of Los Angeles’ DIY artist-built folk-art scenes. Built around the immersive art programs of a Los Angeles-based non-profit museum devoted to the illustrious history of proto-cinematic technologies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book adopts multiple media—including 360-degree panorama, diorama, peepshow, shadow projection performance, crankie, theater, walk-in archival installation, photography, garden, and film—to re-enliven the alien/ated “China” stories on the geographical and cultural edge of Hollywood.

Weiling’s articles have appeared in Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies, in South Asian Review, Museological Review, Critical Digital Humanities Cookbook, Los Angeles Review of Books, and academic anthologies including Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues: Intersections, Opacities, Challenges in Feminist Theorizing and Practice.

Weiling spends a lot of her time reading, writing, and traveling globally. She loves cities with well-curated bookstores and museums, cool architecture and art scenes, expansive public transportation, and grassroots immigrant neighborhoods — in particular Montreal, Dublin, Los Angeles, and Seattle where she continues to build professional connections and engage in community works. As an amateur photographer, she documents the intersection of urban life and urban ruins. She sees ruins — in higher education, industry, and the environment — as generative sites where relations are revolutionized, reimagined, and rebuilt.

Publications & Abstracts

Deng, Weiling. 2025. “Speculative Wuhan Panorama: Scaling Hydro-Urbanism from the Hankou Water Tower.” Verge: Studies in Global Asias, vol. 11, no. 2, special issue The Asian Century: Idea, Method, and Media, edited by Christopher T. Fan, Paul Nadal, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, and Tina Chen, 43-53.

“A Classroom Camera Obscura.” International Panorama Council Newsletter no. 48. June 2025, pp. 38-41.

Deng, Weiling, Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, and Jonathan Banfill. 2024 “Relocating Shengjing: Traveling Panorama as Theory.” In Panoramic and Immersive Media Studies Yearbook Vol. 1, edited by Molly Briggs, Thorsten Logge, and Nicholas Lowe. Berlin: De Gruyter, 25-54.

Deng, Weiling, Sara Velas, Ruby Carlson, and Jonathan Banfill. 2024. “The Feral Garden of the More-than-Panorama Museum.” Museological Review, issue 27, Museums as Spaces of Rootedness and Response-ability, 136-155.

Deng, Weiling. 2023. “Death and Life in the Bordersand–Remembering the Chance of Living during Partition through Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand.” South Asian Review, vol. 45, no. 1-2, special issue Partition: 75 Years and Beyond, edited by Debali Mookerjea-Leonard and Nalini Iyer.

“The Chinese Restaurant on Main Street, U.S.A. – Review of From Chinatown to Every Town by Zai Liang.” Los Angeles Review of Books. September 2023.

Recommended Reading, Listening & Viewing

• Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing)
• The Intimacies of Four Continents (Lisa Lowe)
• Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Saidiya Hartman)