Xinyi Zhao

Field: Japanese Cinema and Literature
Advisor: Takuya Tsunoda
Email: xz2468@columbia.edu

An interdisciplinary scholar by training, Xinyi Zhao aims to reappraise the history of East Asian cinema through unexplored historiographies: transnational, media archaeological, and feminist. Her M.A. thesis excavates the emergence of film culture and spectatorship in colonial Manchuria with respect to the cross-cultural articulation of colonial modernity. Currently she is investigating the shifting postwar Japanese media ecology to reflect on the cinema’s historical interactions and theoretical overlaps with other media practices across East Asia. She is also interested in women’s participation in early film industry worldwide (as a research fellow of the Women Film Pioneers Project), anime, transnational melodrama, and sound studies.

Prior to relocating to EALAC, 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).