Zhifan Sheng is a PhD candidate in Chinese and is also pursuing a graduate certificate in Cinema and Media Studies. His broad academic interests include modern Chinese literature and film, media studies, feminist and queer theory, and digital humanities. In his dissertation project, he explores the shifting cultural and technological underpinnings of letters as media of inscription, transmission, and memory in modern China.

Sheng is a recipient of the 2026 Digital Humanities Summer Fellowship for the project, "Enveloping Affect: The Epistolary Network of Early Chinese Feminism." “Enveloping Affect" proposes a digital archive and analytical corpus of women’s letters in late Qing China (1860s-1911). Challenging conventional scholarship that often sees these letters as mere biographical materials, this project aims to explore how letters constitute women’s affective and relational world in which feminist connections are forged. Specifically, the project will digitize a set of letters from their print and manuscript reproductions, conduct sentiment analysis and network visualizations, and develop a public-facing website that exhibits these products as research and teaching resources. In doing so, the project hopes to reanimate women’s letters as an important cultural record of early Chinese feminism that continues to appeal to contemporary audiences.