Contributors

Roland Betancourt is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art and a Chancellor's Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Disneyland and the Rise of Automation (Princeton University Press, 2026).Xuenan Cao is a writer and scholar of technology and media. Her book Chinese Media Improvisations: Thriving on Deficits (Stanford University Press, 2026) traces a line from paper shortages to AI gadgetry and offers an angle on technological rise in China. She is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and is doing research on LLM-based agentic AI.Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Oxford. Her books include Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China (Duke University Press, 2020) and On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), which was awarded the Modern Languages Association's Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies in 2024.Jamie Jelinski is Lecturer in Visual Culture and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Liverpool. He is the author of Needle Work: A History of Commercial Tattooing in Canada (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2024).Lisa Parks is Distinguished Professor of Film and Media Studies and Director of the Global Media Technologies and Cultures Lab at University of California, Santa Barbara. A media historian and theorist, Parks is a 2018 MacArthur Fellow and has published eight books. She is currently working on Skyward: A Critical History of SpaceX, Starlink, and the Making of Global Satellite Internet.Julia Velkova is Professor of Media and Culture at Linköping University and Profutura Scientia Fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies. Her research examines media infrastructures and their relation to time, energy, and environment. She is finalizing a book on these themes titled Bits and Watts: Electrifying Digital Media in the Age of Climate Change.