Yu Wang is a historian of sound, data, and technology, with a focus on the twentieth-century China. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Toronto in 2019 and has taught there and the University of Macau before moving to Cornell. His current book project, All Ears: Listening to Radio in China, 1940–1976, explores the dynamics of techno-politics in the Mao era, namely how loudspeakers changed the structure of information flow, the making of socialist subjects, urban and rural landscapes, and the formation of political culture in the early PRC period. Some of his research articles have appeared in journals such as Twentieth-Century China, Kaiwu: Science, Technology and Culture, Journal of Chinese Women’s Studies, and Monde Chinois-Nouvelle Asie in north America, Hong Kong, mainland China, and Europe. His second book project concerns the global history of decibels, interrogating the complex dynamics between the body, space, gender, governmentality, and sonic data surrounding the production and localization of acoustic knowledge across the world.

He is deeply interested in the techniques of listening and its interaction with society and politics. He engages with the fascinating life trajectories of portable radios, loudspeakers, wires, microphones, headsets, earbuds, and audiometers, which, together, conjure a ubiquitous soundscape. Shaping and at the same time shaped by the diverse use of various kinds of floors, walls, roads, and forests, this interconnected objects and ambiance of sound facilitates intricate interactions and resonances among both human and non-human actors.