Yasheng She

about me

As an Assistant Professor at North Carolina State University, I teach in Film Studies and in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media PhD program. My work bridges cultural studies, gender and queer theory, and Asian/Asian American studies, with a particular focus on anime and games (both analog and digital) as visual culture.

My current project posits that public memories of turbulent historical events give culturally recognizable texture to (post)apocalyptic imaginations, making them allegorical. In turn, the (post)apocalyptic setting becomes a productive site for working through precarious social realities. Monsters are compelling agents that can speak to historical memories without direct utterance.

In my practice, I think about how mediums organize and persuade us. For example: my Tarot design. I leverage the symmetry between East Asian mythologies and Tarot’s mysticism to think about how we relate to stories and how stories shape our identity.

guidance from the unconscious
a woman flies to the moon after taking the medicine of immortality intended for her and her husband

publications

Transnational Galatea: Racializing Anime-Esque Character Design in Genshin Impact

Book Chapter – [Forthcoming]

Author: Yasheng She

Editors: TreaAndrea M. Russworm and Soraya Murray

Examining the Interplay between Roleplay and Hybridity through Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game.

Journal Article – 2025

Authors: Laijana Braun, Mirek Stolee, Yasheng She, and Devi Acharya.

She, Yasheng. Designing the Global Body: Japan’s Postwar Modernity in Death Stranding

Made in Asia/America: Why Video Games Were Never (Really) about Us

Book Chapter – 2024

Author: Yasheng She

Editors: Christopher B. Patterson and Tara Fickle

more publications

conscious awakening
once there were ten suns until an archer brought down nine

projects

By the Lighthouse

(Working Prototype)

My creative intervention brings the giant woman and her beholder together inside a digital landscape to contemplate her metaphoric function. What does it mean to share a space with the harbinger of the end? How does one feel about a feminine metaphor of absolute power? Does femininity render annihilation comforting?

Composite

(Early Development)

“Composite” thinks through my own queer identity as a collection of defense mechanisms created through navigating the world as a non-binary person. A rogue-lite game that interrogates the process of identity formation.

Argument Box

(Completed)

Argument Box (AB) is an experimental prototype created by Rehaf Aljammaz , a social argument simulator where the player argues with clients visiting the shop. Arguments in AB center around the moral virtues and vices of simulated characters in the social simulation Talk Of the Town. I helped to create early versions of the project through writing, modeling, and data collection.

more projects