Renyi Hong

I am an Associate Professor in the Department of Communications and New Media at the National University of Singapore. I received my Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Southern California. My research examines labor, affect, technology, and capitalism — particularly the states of hopefulness that sustain us in a milieu where optimism runs thin.

My first book, Passionate Work: Endurance After the Good Life (Duke University Press, 2022), examines how passionate work has come to reconfigure ideas of the good life, reframing what workers can hope for in order to stretch their capacities of tolerance. The book was named an Outstanding Academic Title of 2022 by Choice, and has since been translated into Vietnamese and Chinese.

My second book, Work’s Plasticity: Visions of a Bearable Future (contracted, Duke University Press), examines how twenty-first-century digital labor is envisioned as a cure for existential instability. Work has long been understood to cultivate human plasticity — the use of muscle, joints, and brain transforming the body and mind. Though this Lamarckian hypothesis has been refuted, the integration of computational media into work since the twentieth century has closely followed the politics of such plasticity.

You can view my full publications, or contact me at renyihong [at] nus [beep] edu [boop] sg