Dong Xia is a postdoctoral researcher in New Media and Digital Culture at Leiden University. They have backgrounds in literary studies and cultural studies. They currently work on a project researching 'the chronic' as a descriptor of temporal experience in the digital age.

More information about Dong Xia

Fields of interest

• Literary Studies
• Cultural Studies
• Media Theory
• Critical AI Studies
• Cultural Techniques

Research

My research explores how the digital—which is often insensible and imperceptible—can be theorised and represented in ways that are comprehensible both critically and creatively. I draw on literary studies, cultural studies, and media studies, reading across a constellation of contemporary media—from literature to weather forecasts to art installations—to bridge the gap between the depth of machine communication and the surface of the phenomenological world.

My PhD thesis investigates how contemporary fiction can respond to the imperceptible, computational forces that increasingly structure perception, temporality, and space. It foregrounds literature’s nonreferential, procedural, and poetic capacities by examining the formal, infrastructural, and sometimes bureaucratic architectures embedded in contemporary narrative—grids, pixels, lists, and scenario-planning frameworks—and demonstrates how fiction negotiates, resists, and reclaims the informational logics that discretise everyday experience.

As part of the research project ‘Contagious Territories’, my current research focuses on exploring ‘the chronic’ as a descriptor of temporal experience in the digital age, as manifested across financial, technological and medical fields.