Ruoyun Bai

Ruoyun Bai received her Ph.D. in Communications from the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois in 2007. Her research interests focus on Chinese media and popular culture in the context of China's integration into global capitalism. Her research agenda has been driven by a long-standing concern about the political implications of the phenomenal growth of popular media, particularly television and new media, in post-socialist China. Her first book, Corruption Dramas and the Disjunctive Media Order in Contemporary China (forthcoming, UBC Press), interrogates the changing discourses of corruption in Chinese television drama serials from the mid-1990s to the 2010s, and locates the source of these changes in the disjunctive nature of the state-controlled yet highly commercialized Chinese media. In addition to her forthcoming book, she has been published extensively in peer-reviewed journals and anthologies, and co-edited two books (one of them forthcoming). She is currently conducting research for her second single-author book project, Media Scandals in China.

Professor Bai teaches undergraduate courses in Media Studies and Global Asia Studies at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC), including MDSB06 Media and Globalization, MDSC01 Theories and Methods in Media Studies, GASC40 Chinese Media and Politics, and GASC41 Media and Popular Culture in East Asia. For graduate teaching and supervision, she is affiliated with the Centre for Comparative Literature (primary) and Cinema Studies Institute (secondary). She is also an affiliated faculty member at the Asian Institute.