Xun Zheng

Xun Zheng is a PhD student in Japanese film and media. Her research interest focuses on early television and media theories in postwar Japan, which she seeks as a prism to explore the textuality of media experience and the political/ethical implications of broadcasting techniques in the 1960s. Her other interests include Japanese modernist discourse on media and mediation, information studies in Japan, and the history of Chinese television. Prior to joining Columbia for PhD, she received her B.A. from Oberlin College and M.A. from Columbia EALAC.

Xinyi Zhao (趙心怡)

Xinyi Zhao is a doctoral candidate in East Asian cinema and media. An interdisciplinary researcher by training, she aims to reappraise the history of East Asian cinema through underexplored historiographies: transnational, media archaeological, and feminist. Her dissertation, “Cinema as a Quest for Modernity: Film Culture, Spectatorship, and Colonial (After)lives of Manchukuo,” engages with the discursive and social formations of cinema in the Japanese “puppet state” within a larger regional and global media environment. This project has been supported by Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship and Donald Keene Research Grant in Japanese Studies. Her additional research areas include the intersection of affect theory and Japanese New Wave cinema and the translation of Japanese film theory in Republican China.

Xinyi co-translated with Jianqing Chen Thomas Elsaesser’s Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses (Routledge, 2009) into Chinese (under contract with Peking University Press). Her recent work on Japan’s first female director, Sakane Tazuko, appears in The Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism (forthcoming).

Xinyi received her M.A. in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University (2017), M.A. in Chinese Studies from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (2014), and Joint B.A. in Economics and Japanese from Shanghai International Studies University (2012).

Fran Zhao 赵洁敏

Field: Chinese Literature
Advisor: Wei Shang
Email: f.zhao@columbia.edu

Francesca is a PhD student majoring in premodern Chinese literature. For her dissertation, Francesca is working on the politics of the Ming (1368–1644) state theatre through the dual lenses of textualization and stage performance. Her research interests extend to the visual and material culture of East Asian religions.

Francesca has worked as a teaching assistant for courses on Chinese history, Buddhism, strategic visual communication, and Geographic Information Systems (GIS). She was a Lead Teaching Fellow and Teaching Observation Fellow with the Columbia Center for Teaching and Learning. 

Francesca received her BSocSci (Hons) in Geography with a minor in GIS, and MA (Research) in History from the National University of Singapore.