Dr Mia Ma

Biography

Dr Mia Chen Ma is Research Impact Fellow at Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Arts, University of the Arts London. She works collaboratively with researchers to develop meaningful, evidenced and sustainable impact across creative, practice-based, critical and interdisciplinary research. Her work focuses on capturing evidence and activity for REF impact cases, potential impact cases, and impactful projects that may contribute to wider case studies, while also supporting longer-term impact planning through frameworks, tools and capture plans. She brings experience across traditional and non-traditional research outputs — from publications to exhibitions, films, and public-facing digital and creative practice — helping to articulate their research sharpness, impact pathways, and wider cultural, social, educational or institutional value.

Mia’s own research sits across interdisciplinary Chinese Studies and medical-environmental humanities. She explores how literary, digital, cultural and lived narratives shape understandings of ecology, illness and healing within changing social worlds, with particular attention to how these narratives engage questions of policy, politics, care and public life. Her work is shaped by sustained public engagement and collaboration with academic, cultural and community partners across the UK, China and the US. She is especially interested in speculative narratives and world-building as impact-oriented methods for reimagining environmental crisis, health, social change and futures of wellbeing.

Her first monograph, The Green Other: Ecocriticism in Chinese Science Fiction, is forthcoming open access with Brill, supported by the Wellcome Trust. Her wider publications have appeared in Prism, Extrapolation, SFRA Review, Vector, Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature, and The Edinburgh Companion to Science Fiction and the Medical Humanities.

Before joining UAL, Mia developed her research, impact, teaching and knowledge exchange practice through roles and collaborations with the University of Strathclyde, LSE, SOAS, the University of Toronto, Fudan University, Shanghai University and the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences. She has contributed to Wellcome Trust- and British Academy-funded projects involving public engagement, knowledge translation, curriculum development, international collaboration and the collection of research impact evidence. She has taught across Chinese literature, East Asian civilisation, history of medicine, science fiction and contemporary society, and has mentored students and colleagues in shaping research questions, developing projects and articulating the wider value and impact of their work.