Linda Chen Zhang

Field of interest:

• Modern and contemporary film and visual culture (regional focus: China, East Asia)
• Theories and studies of film historiography, animation and comics, space, knowledge production, gender, digital media, video games, and documentary
• Literature, contemporary art, film and new media practices in China and East Asia
• Spatiality and communities of theaters and projection

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

Bio:

Linda C. Zhang is an assistant professor of film in the Art & Media Studies program at Fulbright University Vietnam. She is currently working on her book project titled Animating the Future: Visual Culture and Popular Children’s Media in Twentieth Century China, which offers new understandings of the media history surrounding modern Chinese animation, visual culture, and popular science texts. Her work has appeared in publications including Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Rutgers University Press, Harvard Asia Center, the Association for Chinese Animation Studies, and RadiiChina. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-8310-3336

Select Publication:

Book Chapters

“Toy Country: Playful Innovation in Socialist Chinese Puppet Animation.” In Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion, edited by Daisy Yan Du, John Crespi, and Yiman Wang, pp. 81-102. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center and Harvard University Press, 2025.

“Technological and Athletic Splendor: The Formation of Color in the Socialist Sports Film in China.” In Global Film Color: The Monopack Revolution at Midcentury, edited by Sarah Street and Joshua Yumibe, pp. 109-125. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2024, https://doi.org/10.36019/9781978836839

Peer-reviewed articles

“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, https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2019.1661946

Online reviews for academic field associations:

“Our Comrade Sun Wukong: On Fantasy and Exaggeration in Mountain of Flames.” Association for Chinese Animation Studies. Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, October 4, 2019. https://acas.world/2019/10/04/our-comrade-sun-wukong-on-fantasy-and-exaggeration-in-mountain-of-flames/

Courses:

• The Uncanny, Alien, and Strange: Themes in East Asian Film and Media
• Animation and Graphic Media in East Asia
• Gender and Sexuality in East Asian Film and Fiction
• Memories, Screens, and Theaters in Contemporary Chinese Cinema (Course project website: https://chinesecinemacal.blogspot.com)
• Introduction to Film History and Theory
• Introduction to Visual Studies
• Global Humanities