Professor Bingchun Meng

Professor Bingchun Meng

Professor

Department of Media and Communications

Telephone
020 7107 5020
Room No
FAW.7.01i
Office Hours
By appointment on Student Hub
Languages
English
Key Expertise
political communication, communication governance, gender, China

About me

Bingchun Meng is Professor in the Department for Media and Communications at LSE, where she also co-directs the LSE-Fudan Global Public Policy Research Centre. Professor Meng is currently the Director of LSE PhD Academy and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) Doctoral Training Partnership (DTP).

Professor Meng has a Bachelor's in Chinese Language and Literature (1997) and a Master's in Comparative Literature (2000) from Nanjing University, China. She obtained a PhD in Mass Communication (2006) from the Pennsylvania State University, USA. Before joining the LSE, she was a post-doc fellow at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she worked at the Centre for Global Communication Studies and also taught courses on Chinese media.

Professor Meng’s research interests include gender and the media, political economy of media industries, communication governance, and comparative media studies. She has published widely in these topic areas on leading academic journals. From 2020 to 2021, she served as a Senior Fellow of Global Governance Futures 2035 organized by Global Public Policy Institute in Berlin under the sponsorship with Bosch Foundation. Her book The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation was published by Palgrave in early 2018. She is currently working on another monograph under contract with Columbia University Press about AI industries in China.

Expertise Details

political communication; communication governance; gender; China

Research

Professor Meng’s research is concerned with how institutional forces shape media and communication, and how communicative activities and digital technologies are implicated in the formation of culture, identity and political engagement. Focusing on China as her main empirical site, she aims to advance related academic debates by historicising and retheorising state-market and state-society relations in non-liberal contexts through the lens of media and communication. Drawing insights from multiple disciplines and fields, she critiques the universalist claims often made in the mainstream of social science disciplines, while being vigilant against the lingering ideological legacy of the Cold War in area studies. Thematically speaking, Professor Meng’s research examines 1) various forms of political communication, with particular attention paid to the dynamic role of the state; 2) mediated gender roles, motherhood and varieties of feminism; 3) the politics of digital technologies and the political economy of the digital communication industries.

Publications

Books

  • Meng, B. (2018). The Politics of Chinese Media: Consensus and Contestation. Palgrave Macmillan.

 

Other publications

View a comprehensive list of Dr Meng's publications here

Teaching and supervision

Postgraduate teaching

Professor Meng convenes the popular postgraduate course Global Media Industries and has also contributed lectures to team-taught postgraduate Media and Communications courses on Media and Globalisation, theories and concepts (MC408/MC418) and research methodologies (MC4M1/MC4M2).

Doctoral supervision

Professor Meng supervises doctoral researchers and welcomes applications from prospective students relating to her areas of research. Her current doctoral supervisees include Ronggang Chen, Chenhao Ye, Zifeng Chen, Hao Wang, Ziwei Tang, and Mengyun He.