Biography
Belinda Qian He is a CCS postdoc fellow at UC Berkeley and recently received a PhD in comparative literature, cinema and media studies from the Department of Cinema and Media Studies (CMS), affiliated with China Studies and Taiwan Studies programs, at the University of Washington, Seattle. Her research revolves around East Asian cinema, art, performance, exhibition, and media history, associated with atrocity, violence, and witnessing. Through an interdisciplinary approach at the intersection of art history, media archaeology, museology, and legal humanities, she explores the role of film, photography, and moving image arts in policing, judging, punishing, and social control, with a focus on the weaponization of looking in both local and transnational contexts. She is working on her dissertation, tentatively titled "Expose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in Revolutionary China, 1945-1985." Drawing on archives, ethnographic fieldwork, and an audiovisual corpus, the project explores the making and mass (re-)production of looks of enmity—penal spectacles, hateful images, incriminating media, antagonistic ideologies, and encounters of watching-as-judging in China’s age marked by what may be called class exorcism. Her article on moving images and film theory has recently been published by the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. She is a current Society of Scholars Graduate Fellow (2019-20) and is co-organizing the Dissent Images Research Group with Xiaoshun Zeng and Brian Leung.
Selected Fellowship and Grants
- Society of Scholars Fellowship, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities (2019-20)
- CCKF Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation (2019-20)
- Mellon Fellowships for Dissertation Research in Original Sources (2018-19)
- Asia Art Archive and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation China Research Grant (2017-18)
- Joff Hanauer in Western Civilization Fellowship (2016-17)
- The Graduate School Chester Fritz Fellowship (2016)
- Graduate School Fund for Excellence and Innovation (2015)