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).