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I received my PhD in modern Chinese history with a graduate minor in cinema studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 2011; a MIS in Archival Studies from the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto in 2002; and a BA in French and Cinema Studies at the University of Toronto in 2000.
Prior to my doctoral studies at the University of Illinois, I worked as an archivist at the Archives of Ontario (Toronto) between 2002 and 2003.
My first book Screening Communities (HKUP, 2019) is a substantive revision of my doctoral dissertation. It uses multi-media archival sources, including government archives, memoirs, fan magazines, newspaper reports, and films to narrate the complexity of social change and political turmoil – both screened and lived – in postwar Hong Kong. In particular, Screening Communities explores the political, ideological and cultural work of Hong Kong film culture and its role in the building of a postwar Hong Kong community during the 1950s and 1960s, which was as much defined by lived experiences as by a cinematic construction, forged through negotiations between narratives of empire, nation and the Cold War in and beyond Hong Kong. As such, in order to appreciate the complex formation of colonial Hong Kong society, Screening Communities situates the analysis of the “poetics” of postwar Hong Kong film culture within the larger global processes of colonialism, nationalism, industrialization and the Cold War. It argues that postwar Hong Kong cinema is a three-pronged process of “screening community” that takes into account the factors of colonial governance, filmic expression of left-leaning Cantonese filmmakers and the social makeup of audiences as discursive agents. Through a close study of genre conventions, characterization and modes of filmic narration across select Cantonese films and government documentaries, I contend that 1950s and 1960s Hong Kong cinema, broadly construed, became a site par excellence for the construction and translation (on the ground and onscreen) of a postwar Hong Kong community, whose context was continually shifting – at once indigenous and hybrid, postcolonial and global.
My second book project, funded by the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council – Insight Development Grant, is titled, “The Politics of the Invisible: Sex, Censorship, and the Other in Hong Kong Cinema.” My new project focuses on the representation of sex acts and sexualized bodies on Hong Kong screens and seeks to expose the on- and off-screen sexual identities of Hong Kong’s film talent as well as the multiple and interrelated discourses surrounding the history of screening sex in Hong Kong’s film culture. The goal of this project is to examine the various “viewing positions” adopted by government officials, film audiences and film critics among others toward the explicit representation of sexual acts and sexualized pleasures in Hong Kong cinema. The soft‐core film industry emerged in Hong Kong around the early 1970s. And eventually the proliferation of sexualized bodies on Hong Kong screens since the early 1970s led to the division of film talent and film narratives into different categories of decency. By the late 1980s, the ratings system implemented within the Hong Kong film industry pigeonholed stars in films that explore sexualized acts and sexualized pleasures as “Category III” actors (between the North American ratings of "R‐rated" and "X‐rated"). However, the categorization of film narratives was merely one containment strategy among others that continue to erase the relationships between sex, gender, power and pleasure in Hong Kong cinema. The main problem in this proposed project therefore is to expose the sexual and gender politics within the various discourses on sex found within political, industrial and discursive contexts.
- Insight Development Grant, SSHRC (2017 – 2019)
- Category C Internal Grant (Book Preparation) (2018 – 2019)
- FOA Travel Grant, Wilfrid Laurier University (Winter 2014)
- International Travel Grant, Wilfrid Laurier University (Fall 2013)
- Short-Term Grant , Wilfrid Laurier University (2012 – 2014)
- Initiatory Research Grant, Wilfrid Laurier University (2012)
- Doris G. Quinn Dissertation Completion Fellowship, University of Illinois (2010 – 2011)
- Dissertation Writing Fellowship, History Department, University of Illinois (2009 – 2010)
- Conference Travel Grant, History Department, University of Illinois(2009)
- Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Fellowship (2005 – 2007)
I am willing to supervise graduate students in the areas of film history, Asian cinemas, Cold War and film, and gender and sexuality in film.
Books
Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power and Globalization, co-edited with Jeff Kyong-McClain and Russell Meeuf. Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
- Read Victor Fan's review of the book in the Pacific Affairs.
- Read Cam-Thu Tran's review of the book in IIAS.
- Read review of the book in The China Journal, no. 91 (January 2024).
Screening Communities: Negotiating Narratives of Empire, Nation, and the Cold War in Hong Kong Cinema. Hong Kong University Press, 2019.
- Read Gary Bettinson's review of the book.
- Read Tom Cunliffe's review of the book.
- Read Wing-Fai Leung's review of the book.
- Read Mitchell Ma and Mira Chow's review of the book.
- Read Cameron L. White's review of the book.
- Read Tony Williams' review of the book.
Journal Articles
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“Category III Films in Post-Handover Hong Kong: Excessive Violence and Its Containment in Weiduoliya yi hao and Chuji.” JCMS 62, no. 2 (Winter 2023): 31–55.
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“Liudong de bianjie: ershi shiji wushi niandai de Xianggang dianying.” "流动的 '边界'：20 世纪 50 年代的香港电影” Dangdai dianying 当代电影 (Contemporary Cinema) Vol 7 (July 2017): 135–40. [Chinese translation of my book chapter “Negotiating Cold War and Post/Colonial Politics: Borders and Boundaries in 1950s Hong Kong Cinema”]. ISSN 1002-4646
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“Ann Hui’s Tin Shui Wai Diptych: The Flashback and Feminist Perception in Post-Handover Hong Kong.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 33, no. 8 (2016): 722–42.
- "China Doll in Flight: Li Lihua, World Today and Free China-US Relationship," Film History 26, no. 3 (2014): 1–28.
Book Chapters
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“3D Sex and Zen: Extreme Ecstasy (2011).” With Murrielle Michaud. Invited for Screening Adult Cinema, edited by Desirae Embree, Peter Alilunas, and Finley Freibert (Routledge Series on Screening Companion) (forthcoming in 2025).
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Introduction to Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power and Globalization, co-edited with Jeff Kyong-McClain and Russell Meeuf, 1–15. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2022.
- “Hong Kong at the Movies: Cold War Masculinity, Action Melodrama and Sixties Martial Arts Film.” In The Global 1960s: Convention, Contest and Counterculture, edited by Tamara Chaplin and Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, 176–95. New York: Routledge, 2017.
- “Negotiating Cold War and Post/Colonial Politics: Borders and Boundaries in 1950s Hong Kong Cinema.” In Hong Kong and Bollywood: Globalization of Asian Cinemas, edited by Joseph Tse-Hei Lee and Satish Kolluri, 137–161. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.
FS101 Film and Narrative
FS209C Food and Identity in Film
FS238 Bollywood Film
FS241 Film History Since 1950
FS309M Hong Kong Cinema
FS309P Extreme Asian Cinema
FS333 East Asian Film
FS338 Cold War in Film
FS360 World Cinemas
FS443E Sex and Sensation in Film
FS446A Asian City on Film
FS446E Health and Bioethics in Film
EN617 Identity Politics in Film
Contact Info:
Office location: DAWB 3-158
Office hours:
Thursdays 2:30pm to 3:30pm
And by appointment
Languages spoken: English, French, Cantonese, Mandarin, Hakka