Born and raised in Shanghai, China, Xinghua Li is interested in studying the global spread of consumer capitalism and its impacts on local cultural environments through the perspectives of psychoanalysis and critical media theory. In May 2010, she successfully defended her Ph.D. Dissertation, which compares how Chinese and American green advertising influence and are influenced by different cultures' desires to "go green." Xinghua's previous work used psychoanalysis and poststructural theories to explore the relations between media, desire, and power. She has published in the journal of Media, Culture and Society, the anthology Reading Brokeback Mountain, and for three years she authored the "Looking Abroad" Column for The 21st Century, an English-language weekly in Beijing affiliated with the China Daily News Group. She is currently working on other projects: one employs the notion of the death drive to understand the relations between deadlines and systemized procrastination in modern capitalism; the other studies the digitization of the Chinese language through the computer keyboard and its impacts on literacy and the calligraphic tradition in China.

Prior to coming to Babson, Xinghua has taught courses on media and communication theory, advertising and consumer culture, rhetoric and public speaking at the University of Iowa and Ohio University. During her free time, she enjoys karaoke, jogging, biking, strolling through shopping malls, and watching movies.