Shaoling Ma is an interdisciplinary scholar and critical theorist of global Chinese history, literature, and media. At the broadest level, she is drawn to historical periods when geopolitical, socio-economic, and technological developments appear to provide external vantage points from which to navigate the landscape of cultural production, while, in fact, being resolutely embedded in the latter. Ma's teaching and research interests include late nineteenth-century to contemporary Chinese and Southeast Asian cultural productions, media studies, and critical theory.

Ma is the author of The Stone and the Wireless: Mediating China, 1861-1906 (Duke UP, 2021). Her peer-reviewed articles have appeared in Comparative Literature Studies; Critical Inquiry; and positions; asia critique. She is currently working on a second book, tentatively titled China in Loops, which examines how self-generating loops between technologies “themselves” and other societal forces in the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Singapore produce the reciprocating realities and constructs of a global “Chinese” dominance from the 1960s to the contemporary period. Topics for other concurrent projects include the gendered transformations of labor in literature and cinema; cybernetics and systems thinking in socialist, post-socialist, and decolonizing Asian states; and Marxist media theory.