Ying Qian
Assistant Professor
Office: 930 IAB
Phone: (212)854-5027
Email: yq2189@columbia.edu
Educational Background
AB: Harvard University
MPhil: University of Cambridge, UK
PhD: Harvard University (’13)
Classes Taught
EAAS UN3322 East Asian Cinema
EAAS GU4572 Chinese Documentary Cinema
EAAS GR8998 Media Cultures in China
Research Interests
Chinese Cinema, Visual Culture, Media Studies
Ying Qian is interested in a wide range of topics in Chinese literature, cinema and media studies, including documentary cinema in comparative perspectives, experience and memory of China’s revolutions and socialism, and writing, translation and filmmaking in China’s multi-lingual and multi-ethnic border regions and among the Chinese diaspora. She is completing a book manuscript entitled Visionary Realities: Documentary Cinema in China’s Revolutionary Century, which investigates documentary cinema’s capacities to mediate between the visible and the visionary in a society engineering its own radical transformation. She has also begun researching for her second book project, which examines works and lives of writers, translators, and filmmakers working bilingually between Chinese and a non-Han language within China. Besides academic research, she has been a filmmaker, critic and film programmer. She has been programming documentary and Asian cinemas for the last five years. Her film criticism has appeared in Chinese, English and Czech language newspapers and journals, and her own documentary and short films have been exhibited and broadcasted in a number of countries. She joins Columbia after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Australian National University.
Selected Publications
“The Spectre of Liu Shaoqi,” in A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard, 2017)
“Working with Rubble: Montage, Tweets, and the Reconstruction of an Activist Cinema,” in China’s iGeneration: Filmmakers, Films and Audiences in a New Media Age (Continuum, 2014)
“Power in the Frame: Independent Documentary in China,” The New Left Review (2012)
