Xinghua Li (xli1@mit.edu)

Xinghua Li is Associate Professor of Media Studies from Babson College. Born and raised in Shanghai, she finished her Ph.D. in Media Studies at the University of Iowa. Her research interests center on global consumerism and China, advertising and commercial media, and their relationship with desire and the environment. Her first book Environmental Advertising in China and the USA: The Desire to Go Green (Routledge 2016) conducts a cross-cultural comparison of green advertising and uses a combination of historical, rhetorical, and psychoanalytic methods to analyze the ideologies and structures of desire that drive Chinese and American consumers to “go green.” Li has also published in Media, Culture and Society, Environmental Communication, the anthology Reading Brokeback Mountain, and for three years she authored the "Looking Abroad" Column for The 21st Century, an English-language weekly in Beijing affiliated with the China Daily News Group. For her visiting period at CMS/W, Li will begin her second book project to explore contemporary Chinese consumers’ encounter with the “wild” through mass and digital media. Li is Chair of the Environmental Communication Division at the International Communication Association from 2018 to 2020, and the Founding Member of the International Environmental Communication Association.