Emily Wilcox is currently a Professor of Chinese Studies at William & Mary, USA. She received her bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 2003, her master's degree from the University of Cambridge in 2004, and her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2011. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary Chinese dance and performing arts culture, as well as modern and contemporary Chinese cultural studies. She has served as President of the Association for Asian Performance, on the Board of Directors of the Dance History Society, on the Board of Directors of the Dance Studies Association, and on the Board of Directors of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China. She currently serves as Chair of the East Asia Committee of the Association for Asian Studies and as Co-Editor of Dance Chronicle. Her book Revolutionary Bodies: Chinese Dance and the Socialist Legacy received the Dance Studies Association's 2019 Book Award and was published in Chinese translation by Fudan University Press in 2023. She has edited the anthologies Corporeal Politics: Dancing East Asia, Inter-Asia in Motion: Dance as Method, and Teaching Film from the People's Republic of China, and has translated Xu Rui's Aesthetic and Self-Consciousness in Contemporary Chinese Ethnic and Folk Dance Creation into English. In 2024, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her research project on dance diplomacy between China and the Global South in the 1950s–60s.

Professor Wilcox will conduct visiting research at the International Center for Studies of Chinese Civilization, Fudan University, from June to July 2026.