The UBC Department of English Language & Literatures is pleased to invite you to a 2025/2026 Guest Speaker Lecture featuring Dr. Wendy Sung, Assistant Professor, Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA.
This lecture can be attended in-person only. Please be sure to register using the link below. This lecture is open to everyone.
This event is co-sponsored by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, SFU’s David Lam Centre, UBC Faculty of Arts, UBC Department of English Language & Literatures.
Talk Description
Dr. Wendy Sung (Assistant Professor, Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA) will give a talk on the (mis)recognitions of the Asian face, theorizing an alternative history of biometrics. Dr. Sung will be in conversation with Dr. Danielle Wong (Department of English Language and Literatures, UBC) after the presentation.
Talk Abstract
This talk charts how and why the Asian face functions as a sociotechnical formation, an origin of bioinformatic control, and simultaneously, an evasion of it. The mug shot and modes of phrenological and photographic comparison to legitimate eugenics-based categorization have long been acknowledged as precursors to modern facial recognition technologies. However, this presentation traces a pre-history of these technologies to different biometric past: the rise of immigration identification papers within the US when the Chinese Exclusion laws marked the formal emergence of visual documentation regulation into immigration policy. Through this origin point, this talk examines how the Asian face can serve as an interface that highlights the difference between a face and its masks, between a keeper of technological secrets and the aesthetics of facial misrecognition, demonstrating that the hyperscrutiny paid to the Asian face and its misrecognitions are not the glitches in these technologies but in fact, central features.
About the Speaker
Dr. Wendy Sung is an assistant professor of race, visuality, and digital culture in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. Her research focuses on race and comparative ethnic studies, transmedia histories and digital technologies, and cultural memory and visuality. She is at work on her first monograph, Violent Virality: Racial Violence and the Making of New Media which examines the relationships between race, technology, and media cultures through the phenomenon of watching racial violence in 20th and 21st century American culture. She is a former UC President’s Fellow, and her work has been supported by the Institute for Citizens and Scholars and the Society of Hellman Fellows. She has published in Social Text, Limn, The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), and Feminist Media Histories, among others.