Staff profile

Tong Meng is a PhD student at the School of Education, who is supervised by Dr Cora Lingling Xu and Dr Anna Llewellyn. Her research interests include digital dating, intimate relationships, gender and international students’ mobility. Tong’s doctoral research is about Chinese international students’ perceptions and experiences of using mobile dating applications and the relationships between dating applications using and their transformations of intimacy in a transnational context.

Prior to her PhD study, Tong obtained her Bachelor's degree in English language and literature at Taiyuan University of Technology and an MA degree (Distinction) in TESOL at Institute of Education, UCL. During her MA studying period, she conducted interviews with many international students, finding that Chinese international students experience loneliness, and emotional loss while studying in the UK. Students’ emotional demands and strategies (e.g. using dating applications) to cope with it attracted her attention and arose her research interest in students’ perceptions and experiences of using dating apps. Prior to her PhD study, she taught TOEFL reading and IELTS speaking to Chinese learners of English.

• Chinese international students
• International student mobility
• Intimate relationships
• China studies
• Digital intimacy