Linda Chen Zhang

Fields of Interest:

Socialist animation, visual culture, and popular science (regional focus: China, East Asia)
Theories of virtual space, perception, and digital creation, perception
Spatiality and communities of theaters and projection
Media history and technology

Education: Ph.D. 2022, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Bio:

Linda C. Zhang’s work engages the history of modern Chinese film and popular culture, and she is interested in questions of subject and national formation and knowledge production through media and technology. She teaches courses on East Asian cinema, modern Chinese film and literature, and film history and theory. She received her Ph.D. (East Asian Languages and Cultures, emphasis in Film and Media) from the University of California, Berkeley.

Linda is currently completing a book project titled “Technological Futures: Animated Media in Socialist China,” which offers new understandings of the media history surrounding modern Chinese animation, visual culture, and popular science texts from the early Maoist era. Her research has been supported by fellowships and grants from the Fulbright (IIE) U.S. Student program, the ACLS Henry Luce foundation, and the UC Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies. Her work has appeared in academic and popular publications including Journal of Chinese Cinemas, the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, and RadiiChina, with more work forthcoming at Rutgers University Press and Harvard University Press. She has previously worked as an academic contributor, translator, and interpreter for film festival and screening events with the Berkeley Art Museum Pacific Film Archive, the China Film Archive, The Wattis Institute at the California College of the Arts, Duke University Libraries, and the Mill Valley Film Festival.

Courses:

The Uncanny, Alien, and Strange: Themes in East Asian Film and Media
Memories, Screens, and Theaters in Contemporary Chinese Cinema
Global Humanities

Select Publications:

Zhang, Linda C. “The animated worlds of Piercing I, iMirror, and RMB City: Decoding postsocialist reality through virtual spaces,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 13, no. 2 (2019): 147-163.
Zhang, Linda C. “Our Comrade Sun Wukong: On Fantasy and Exaggeration in Mountain of Flames.” Association for Chinese Animation Studies Film Review. October 2019.
Zhang, Linda C. “The Formation of Color in the Socialist Sports Film” in Global Film Colour, edited by Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe. Publication anticipated for 2023.