Xinyu Dong received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations (with a secondary field in Film and Visual Studies) from Harvard University in 2009. Her research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary in East Asian studies and trans-cultural in Film and Communication Studies. She has taught courses on topics ranging from communication in contemporary America to East Asian modernities, and from world silent cinema to popular culture in modern China. Her research interests include late imperial and modern Chinese literature and culture as well as regional (East Asian) and global image exchange. She is currently working on a book manuscript, China at Play: Republican Film Comedies and Chinese Cinematic Modernity, which introduces the notion of “play” to the study of modern China and national cinema as both a theoretical intervention and a historical excavation of a rich ludic tradition that encompasses theatre and cinema, humans and machines, popular culture and the avant-garde.
Growing up in her “cinema paradiso,” a movie theater where her mother worked for fifteen years as the poster artist, she has found her great outdoors in the lounges of movie theaters all over the world. That said, she expects to learn to appreciate sunshine in as many ways as possible in the sunshine state of California.