Wanning Sun is a Professor of Media and Communication Studies at UTS. A fellow of Australian Academy of the Humanities since 2016, she was a member of the ARC College of Experts (2020-2023). She is now the Deputy Director of Australia-China Relations Institute, UTS.

Wanning is actively engaged in public debate, sharing her work with the broader community, and regularly contributing to high-profile policy journals, and media outlets such as the ABC and The Conversation. She is a columnist for Crikey.

Wanning has published two significant reports: 'Chinese-Language Media in Australia: Developments, Challenges and Opportunities' and 'First-Generation PRC Migrants and Social Cohesion: View on News about the PRC and Chinese-Australians'. She has also provided pro bono consultancy to think tanks and various government departments in Australia, on issues related to Chinese-Australian communities and Chinese-language media.

As an academic researcher, Wanning is best known for her ethnography of rural-to-urban migration in China, and for her study of transnational and diasporic Chinese media. 

Wanning has produced a significant body of research on the cultural politics of inequality in China. This work can be found in Maid in China: Media, Morality and the Cultural Politics of Boundaries (2009), Subaltern China: Rural Migrants, Media and Cultural Practices (2014), and her edited volume Love Stories in China: The Politics of Intimacy in the Twenty-First Century (2020, with Ling Yang). Her latest book on this topic is Love Troubles: Inequality in China and Its Intimate Consequences (2023, Bloomsbury).

Over the past two decades, Wanning has spearheaded global diasporic Chinese-language media as an distinct area of research, with the publications of her first book Leaving China: Media, Migration, and Transnational Imagination (2002), and three edited Routledge volumes on this topic: Media and the Chinese Diaspora: Community, Communications and Commerce (2006), Media and Communication in the Chinese Diaspora: Rethinking Transnationalism (2016, with John Sinclair), WeChat and the Chinese Diaspora (2022, with Haiqing Yu), and Digital Transnationalism: Chinese-language Media in Australia (2023, with Haiqing Yu).

Wanning gained her PhD from the University of Western Sydney. Before joining UTS, she held the positions of Associate Professor at Perth’s Curtin University (2008) and Visiting Professor at the State University of New York (2005-2006).