Weihong Bao joins UC Berkeley Faculty

Weihong Bao, currently Assistant Professor at Columbia University, will be joining the Film & Media and East Asian Languages & Cultures Departments in Fall 2012.  She received her joint Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations & Cinema and Media Studies from University of Chicago in 2006.  Professor Bao, trained both in film studies and East Asian literature and culture, focuses on early Chinese cinema and the dramatic and visual culture from late Qing to the contemporary period. Her book manuscript examines the historical operation of aesthetic affect and intermediality from the late nineteenth century to the mid 1940s in Chinese film and media culture. Her teaching interests cover late Qing visual and performance culture, Chinese language cinema of all periods and regions, transnational cinema, “New Wave” and genre cinema, and contemporary Chinese film, video, and experimental art.

Professor Bao’s recent publications include “The Politics of Remediation: Mise-en-scène and the Subjunctive Body in Chinese Opera Film,” Opera Quarterly 26, no. 2–3 (2010): 256–291; “In Search of a Cinematic Esperanto: Exhibiting Wartime Chongqing Cinema in Global Context,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 3, no. 2 (2009); “Biomechanics of Love: Reinventing the Avant-Garde in Tsai Ming-liang’s Wayward ‘Pornographic Musical,’” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 1, no. 2 (2007); “From Pearl White to White Rose Woo: Tracing the Vernacular Body of Nüxia in Chinese Silent Cinema, 1927–1931,” Camera Obscura 60 (2005); and “A Panoramic Worldview: Probing the Visuality of Dianshizhai huabao,” Journal of Modern Chinese Literature 32 (March 2005).