Joyce (Chunyu) Wang is a New York–based researcher, editor, and designer working across comparative literature, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and digital media theory. Her research examines how artificial intelligence reshapes desire, proximity, and language; how the human impulse to find meaning and intimacy is projected onto the immaterial, algorithmic voice.
Her ongoing project, AI & Desire, situates digital technologies within a lineage of aesthetic and psychoanalytic tradition, tracing how the human drive towards excess, attachment, and transgression can be reproduced in algorithms. Drawing from Lacan’s objet petit a, Kristeva’s theory of abjection and semiotic drive, and Benjamin’s concept of aura to theorize mediation as both loss and lure.
Outside academia, Joyce serves as Senior Poetry Editor of the Journal of Experimental Practice and as an Editor and Designer at Box Turtle Press / Mudfish Magazine, where she develops and designs books that bridge poetics and art. She is also the Founding Series Editor for the Spoonbill & Sugartown Poet Series, curating and designing interdisciplinary works that help her to think critically about language not only as a theoretical concept but as a material practice, how the visual presentation of texts can shape interpretation.
Joyce is completing her M.A. in Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement at New York University, where she also pursues an Advanced Certificate in Digital Humanities.
This project reinterprets Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye through the lens of metaphor and mutability. It traces how the eye mutates across forms — egg, orb, void — to destabilize fixed meaning and reveal excess as an aesthetic principle. In staging this "spherical metaphor," the work explores how Bataille's writing unsettles symbolic order and produces a poetics of transgression.
Published in the International Journal of Digital Humanities (Vol. 1, No. 03, September 2025). This article examines how artificial intelligence inherits and transforms aesthetic logics of fetishization, aura, and longing. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire, and Anne Carson, it interrogates how machine agency is framed through desire and absence, situating AI within broader debates on media, poetics, and subjectivity.
A theoretical manifesto that examines how absence, refusal, and negation function as literary strategies. Engaging texts such as Melville's Bartleby and Beckett's late works, the project situates "nothingness" within twentieth-century continental philosophy and experimental poetics. It argues that the refusal of meaning, rather than a void, becomes an aesthetic resource for reimagining literature's possibilities.
July 1–3, 2026 · NOVA School of Social Sciences and Humanities, Lisbon, Portugal. "Vision Without Object: The Eye as Symbolic Excess in Bataille." Accepted.
April 16-17, 2026 · University of the Aegean, Rhodes, Greece. "Mechanical Memory and Collective Amnesia: From Arendt’s Bureaucracy to Benjamin’s Surrealism in the Age of A.I." Accepted.
March 5–8, 2026 · Northeast Modern Language Association, Pittsburgh, PA. "Surrender to the Inevitable: Interdisciplinarity as Renewal and Revival." Accepted.
March 5–8, 2026 · Northeast Modern Language Association, Pittsburgh, PA. "The Courage to Be Misunderstood: Nietzsche's Poetics of Transgression." Accepted.
February 26 - March 1, 2026 · Proposal under review: "The Driving Eye: Bataille's Spherical Metaphors and the Fluidity of Signification."
March 20, 2026 · Proposal under review: "Archipelagos of Desire: Psychoanalysis and the Digital Uncanny."
October 19, 2025 · Spoonbill & Sugartown Books, Brooklyn. Reader, moderator.
January 29, 2025 · Spoonbill & Sugartown Books, Brooklyn. Moderator.
Download the full CV as PDF: CV 2025 – Joyce (Chunyu) Wang.pdf
Email: cw4184@nyu.edu
Elsewhere: ORCID · Academia.edu · Google Scholar