Dr Peng works primarily on early- to mid-20th century American film history, media technologies (especially telecommunications), and racialised labour. She’s published on talkies and early Asian American movie stars Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa; early Technicolor and Hollywood Orientalism; 1930s Busby Berkeley musical and racial capitalism; film historiography in relation to newsreel outtakes and lost silent film; and the “first” Chinese film actress, Yan Shanshan. She is now writing a book-length media history of San Francisco’s Chinatown telephone exchange (c. 1894-1949) and its operators. An essay based on materials from this project, “‘The Chinaman and His Phone’: Noise, Gibberish, and the Telephone’s Social Use,” has won the Race and Histories of Technology Prize from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in 2024.
