Qian He (she/her/hers)

Belinda Qian He is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Hé's work lies at the intersection of film/media studies, art history, and legal humanities, exploring the role of film, photography, video, and emerging media in policing, punishing, and justice making. She pays specific attention to the history of East Asian and global cinema, exhibitions, and participatory media, associated with atrocity, witnessing, sexual violence and trauma. 

She co-edited a special double issue (with Dr. Timmy Chen), "A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia," for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and has collaborated on the Global Cinema collection of the Media History Digital Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She recently curated the screening series "Machines and Me: A Filmless Festival" as part of The Work of Self-Assembly in Global Asian Media and Art initiative, supported by the Arts for All program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). Before joining the University of Illinois, Dr. Hé was an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Maryland, College Park, with affiliations in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute (AIM). She was previously a CCS Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and has also taught global and Asian film and media at the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of Oklahoma.

Selected Fellowships and Grants during her time at UW

• 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)