Xinyi Zhao '17 Receives Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship

Film and Media Studies alumna and current PhD candidate in East Asian Languages and Cultures Xinyi Zhao '17 received the Japan Foundation Dissertation Fellowship to conduct field work for her PhD dissertation, titled Cinema as a Quest for Modernity: Film Culture, Spectatorship, and Colonial (After)lives of Manchukuo. She is currently conducting her field work at Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan until October 2022. For the purpose of promoting Japanese studies overseas, the Japan Foundation provides support to preeminent foreign scholars in Japanese studies to give them an opportunity to conduct research in Japan.

Prior to the PhD program, Zhao received her MA in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University under the advisory of Professor Jane Gaines. Her dissertation explores the film culture and spectatorship in colonial Manchuria and imperial Japan via transnational, media archaeological, and feminist historiographies. She co-translated Thomas Elsaesser’s book, Film Theory: An Introduction Through the Senses, into Chinese with Jianqing Chen '14. The book is under contract with Peking University Press. Her recent research paper on the first Japanese female director, Sakane Tazuko, appears in The Routledge Companion to Queer Theory and Modernism (forthcoming). 

The Japan Foundation is Japan's only institution dedicated to carrying out comprehensive international cultural exchange programs throughout the world. To cultivate friendship and ties between Japan and the world, the Japan Foundation creates global opportunities to foster friendship, trust, and mutual understanding through culture, language, and dialogue. The Japan Foundation was established in October 1972 as a special legal entity supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.