Fall 2021
Calvin Hui, Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Chinese Studies,
College of William and Mary
Calvin Hui is a Class of 1952 Distinguished Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of William and Mary in the United States. His research focuses on modern Chinese humanities (film, media, and literature), Hong Kong studies, critical theory, and cultural studies, with particular emphases on Marxist theory, gender and sexuality studies, and post-colonial and transnational studies. His first book, titled The Art of Useless: Fashion, Media, and Consumer Culture in Contemporary China, was published by Columbia University Press in September 2021. Hui is a recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship (2019). He is also a recipient of the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange Research Grant (2020) and Scholar Grant (2016). To access his profile, click here.
Fall 2020
Arina Rotaru, Assistant Professor, BNU-HKBU United International College
Arina Rotaru is an assistant professor in the General Education Office and at the Center for Foreign Languages and Cultures at the BNU-HKBU United International College. She is also an affiliate at the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at the University of Hong Kong. Her previous appointments include lectureships at the University of Hong Kong and at NYU Shanghai as well as teaching appointments at Cornell University and Ithaca College. Dr. Rotaru holds a PhD in German Studies and Comparative Literature from Cornell University and a Magisterium in Social Philosophy and Mobility Studies from Pontifical University Urbaniana, Rome. Her work explores minority cultures, sound and performance studies, contemporary German literature as well as world literature and film. Dr. Rotaru’s research has been sponsored by fellowships from the NYU Visual Arts Council, the DAAD, the Mario Einaudi Foundation, the Max Kade Foundation and the Marbach Archive for Contemporary German Literature.
Spring 2020
Calvin Hui, Associate Professor, College of William and Mary
Calvin Hui is a recipient of 2019 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) fellowship, one of the most prestigious fellowships in the humanities in the U.S. academy. He is a tenured Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at the College of William and Mary, the second oldest institution of high learning in the United States of America. In 2013, he received his PhD in Literature at Duke University. His first book focuses on fashion, fiction films, documentary films, and consumer culture in contemporary China. His second research project concerns contemporary China’s copycat cultures. To access his profile, click here. E-mail: kchui@wm.edu.
Sebastian Veg, Professor, School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences
Sebastian Veg is a Professor (directeur d’études) of intellectual history of 20th century China at the School of Advanced Studies in Social Sciences (EHESS), Paris and an Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong. He was director of the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Hong Kong from 2011 to 2015.
His doctoral research was devoted to literary and political debates about modernism and democracy in the May Fourth era (Fictions du pouvoir chinois. Littérature, modernisme et démocratie au début du xxe siècle, Paris: Editions de l’EHESS, 2009), followed by a second project on the new intellectuals in China since the 1990s (Minjian: the Rise of China’s Grassroots Intellectuals, Columbia UP, 2019). He was the co-principal investigator for a France-Hong Kong research grant on “New Approaches to the Mao Era: everyday history and popular memory,” and editor of Popular Memories of the Mao Era (Hong Kong University Press, 2019). Most recently, he has published a series of articles on cultural and political debates in Hong Kong since the handover.
Spring 2019
Rick Dolphijn, Associate Professor, Utrecht University
Dr. Rick Dolphijn is an associate professor based at Humanities, with an interest in transdisciplinary research at large. He wrote Foodscapes, Towards a Deleuzian Ethics of Consumption (Eburon/University of Chicago Press 2004) and (with Iris van der Tuin) New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies (Open Humanities Press 2012) and is finishing his new monograph entitled The Cracks of the Contemporary; A Meditation on Art, Wounds and a Damaged Earth. He has published widely on new materialism, ecology/ecosophy, feminist/postcolonial theory and, contemporary art and is interested in the developments in continental philosophy and speculative thought. His academic work has appeared in journals like Angelaki, Rhizomes, Collapse, and Deleuze Studies. He edited (with Rosi Braidotti) This Deleuzian Century: Art, Activism, Life (Brill/Rodopi 2014/5) and Philosophy after Nature (2017). Most recently he published an edited volume entitled Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary with Bloomsbury Academic.
Elena Pollacchi, Lecturer in Chinese Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden
Elena Pollacchi is Lecturer in Chinese Studies. She has taught courses on Chinese cinema and culture at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and at Gothenburg University (Sweden). She is also programmer for Chinese and South Korean film at the Venice International Film Festival. Her research encompasses the Chinese film market in its transnational connections, Chinese documentary film, and film festivals. Her recent publications include chapters in Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (eds. C. Berry, L. Robinson, Palgrave Macmillan 2017), Taiwan Cinema: International Reception and Social Change (eds. K. Chiu, M. Rawnsley, G. Rawnsley, Routledge, 2017) and Screening China’s Soft Power (P. Voci, L.Hui; Routledge, 2018), and the article “Extracting narratives from reality: Wang Bing’s counter-narrative of the China Dream” for the Journal of Documentary Studies (Special Issue: Engagement, Witnessing and Activism: Independent Chinese Documentary Filmmakers Different Positions, Approaches and Aesthetics), 11:3 (2017).
Arina Rotaru, Lecturer, NYU Shanghai
Having recently moved to Hong Kong, Dr. Arina Rotaru served as full-time Lecturer in the Core Curriculum and the Writing Program at NYU-Shanghai for the past four years. After studying and working in various European countries, she obtained her doctorate in German and Comparative Literature and became a visiting scholar at Cornell University and a lecturer in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Ithaca College. Her academic interests include gender and cultural studies, sound, film, and performance studies as well as comparative modernities. She has published in various interdisciplinary journals, including Germanic Review, Journal of World Literature, Studia Theodisca, Forum for Modern Languages Studies and edited collections on totalitarian arts, “worlding Asia” and aesthetics and politics. Together with Dr. I-Yi Hsieh, Arina was awarded a grant from NYU Visual Arts Council for an initiative on diaspora visual arts, which featured a global exchange with artists and curators from Taiwan, US, and South Korea.
Fall 2018
Dina Iordanova, Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures,
University of St. Andrews
Dina Iordanova is Professor of Global Cinema and Creative Cultures at the University of St Andrews. She launched the acclaimed Film Studies programme at Scotland’s oldest University in 2005 and eventually also served as the University’s Provost (Dean of Graduate Studies), as well as on the Board of Trustees for the Edinburgh International Film Festival. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and of the Institute of Directors. Most of her work in recent years has been dedicated to the wonderfully complex and vibrant world of global film festivals and film circulation. Dina Iordanova is the author of numerous books on international cinema and is a leading authority in the area of the transnational cinema.
September Liu, PhD Candidate, Department of Film Studies,
University of St. Andrews
September Liu is a PhD candidate in the Department of Film Studies, University of St.Andrews. His current research focuses on nostalgia and New Chinese Cinemas. He has received an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Downing College, University of Cambridge, and two BAs in English and Chinese Literature at Peking University.