Professor Daisy Yan DU received her PhD degree in East Asian Studies and PhD minor in English Literature from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in May 2012. She worked as a tenure-track assistant professor and director of undergraduate studies in Chinese at the University of Miami in Florida before she joined the faculty of the Division of Humanities at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in August 2013. She is interested in animation, film, media, feminist film criticism, critical race/ethnicity studies, transnational film studies, modern Chinese literature and visual culture, women/children/animal/machine/technology, travel/migration/diaspora, and modernity/modernism studies. Her first monograph, Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation 1940s-1970s, was published by the University of Hawaii Press in 2019. She is currently working on two monographs tentatively titled Plasmatic Empire: Animated Filmmaking in the Manchukuo Film Association (1937-1945) and Suspended Animation. Recently she started a new research project on women animators in China and is editing a few volumes about animation and new media. She is the founder of the Association for Chinese Animation Studies (https://acas.world/), which is dedicated to introducing and promoting Chinese animation to the English-speaking world.

Research Interests

animation, film, media, feminist film criticism, critical race/ethnicity studies, transnational film studies, modern Chinese literature and visual culture, women/children/animal/machine/technology, travel/migration/diaspora, and modernity/modernism studies

Representative Publications

Monographs

Animated Encounters: Transnational Movements of Chinese Animation, 1940s-1970s, University of Hawaii Press, 2019. 

Plasmatic Empire: Animated Filmmaking in the Manchukuo Film Association (1937-1945), ongoing

Suspended Animation, ongoing 

Edited Books
Chinese Animation and Socialism: From Animators’ Perspectives, Brill, 2021.

The Encyclopedia of Animation Studies, Bloomsbury reference, as the editor overseeing Asia, 2024. 

Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion, co-editing with John Crespi and Yiman Wang, ongoing 

Augmented Geography: The Places of Chinese Animation, co-editing with Thomas Lamarre, ongoing 

Anthology of Animation Theories and Criticism in Greater China, ongoing

 

Representative Refereed Journal Articles 

"The Manchukuo Film Association and Its Afterlives: Animated Filmmaking in Wartime and Postwar Peking," Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal), 63.3 (Spring 2024), forthcoming        

"A Theory of Suspended Animation: The Aesthetics and Politics of (E)motion and Stillness," Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, 44.1 (Spring 2022): 42-77. 

"Suspended Animation: The Wan Brothers and the (In)Animated Mainland-Hong Kong Encounter, 1947-1956," Journal of Chinese Cinemas 11.2 (2017): 140-158.

"Socialist Modernity in the Wasteland: Changing Representations of the Female Tractor Driver in China, 1949-1964," Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 29. 1 (Spring 2017): 55-94.   

“The Dis/appearance of Animals in Animated Film during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976,” Positions: Asia Critique, 24.2 (2016): 435-479. 

“Living under the Same Roof: A Genealogy of the Family Romance between Mother-in-law and Daughter-in-law in Modern Chinese Hi/story,” Gender & History 25.1 (April 2013): 170-191.

“Diffusion of Absence: The Official Appropriation of Yuan Zhen in Modern Tongzhou,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 22.2 (Fall 2010): 130-160.

“Documenting Three Gorges Migrants: Gendered Voices of Dis/placement and Citizenship in Rediscovering the Yangtze River and Bingai,” Women’s Studies Quarterly 38.1&2 (Spring/Summer 2010): 27-47. 

Other (Refereed) Journal Articles
“The Failed Madman in ‘Dead Quiet and Emptiness:’ Death Drive and the Gendered Melancholic Subject in Lu Xun’s ‘Regret for the Past,’” East Asia Forum vol. 13 (Autumn 2010): 88-106.

“The Spring Rain Festival in Hou ren (Man at Arms),” Journal of Renmin University of China (English Edition) 5.2 (Autumn 2010): 136-144.

“Sexualized Confucianism and Confucian Sexuality,” Sexuality & Culture 11.3 (Summer 2007): 51-61.

“The Fire and the Rose Are One: The Dantesque Purification of Language in T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding,’” Comparative Literature: East and West 9.1 (Autumn/Winter 2007): 48-54.

 

Invited Book Chapters

"Melting the Iron Curtain: Political Immediacy, Metal-morphosis, and the Caricatured Western Leaders in Agitprop Animation in Socialist China, 1940s-1960s," in Routledge Companion to Asian Cinemas, edited by Zhen Zhang (lead editor), Sangjoon Lee, Debashree Mukherjee, and Intan Paramaditha, forthcoming  

"Chinese Animation and Transnational Film Studies," in Routledge Handbook of Transnational Chinese Cinemas, edited by Chris Berry, Yomi Braester, and Yiman Wang, forthcoming  

"The Dis/appearance of Animals in Animated Film during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976," Surveillance in Asian Cinema, edited by Karen Fang. London: Routledge, 2017. 

"The Dis/appearance of Animals in Animated Film during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976," Retelling Fantastic Tales in East Asian and Global Contexts, edited by Liang Luo. Leiden: Brill, 2018.                        

Book Reviews
Review of Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media (Sean Macdonald, 2016), Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 11.3 (2016). 

Review of Representing Children in Chinese and U.S. Children’s Literature (edited by Claudia Nelson and Rebecca Morris, 2014), The China Journal 75 (January 2016).

Review of Chinese Literature and the Child: Children and Childhood in Late-Twentieth-Century Chinese Fiction (Kate Foster, 2014), The China Journal 73 (January 2015).

“New Asian Female Ghost Films,” review of The New Asian Female Ghost Films: Modernity, Gender Politics, and Transnational Transformation (Hunjun Lee, 2011), Dissertation Review: Gender Performance, May 21, 2013.

“A Narrow Cage,” review of Developmental Fairy Tales: Evolutionary Thinking and Modern Chinese Culture (Andrew Jones, 2011), China Information: A Journal on Contemporary China Studies 26.1 (March 2012).

“Salvaging Memories from the Ruins of the Three Gorges,” review of In the Lap of the Gods (Li Miao Lovett, 2010), The China Beat, January 24, 2012.

“Shanghai Spaces and Histories,” review of Years of Red Dust: Stories of Shanghai (Qiu Xiaolong, 2010), The China Beat, March 1, 2011.

“Modern Chinese Cinderella in Jianghu,” review of Chinese Cinderella and the Secret Dragon Society (Adeline Yen Mah, 2004), SOAS Literary Review 4 (Spring 2005).


Short Essays (under 3000 words)

“Katong, Meishupian, and Donghua: On Terms of Chinese Animation,” Association for Chinese Animation Studies, February 7, 2019. 

“Chinese Animation at International Film Festivals,” Association for Chinese Animation Studies, January 9, 2016.  

“Socialism and the Rise of the First Camerawoman in History of Chinese Animation,” Gender and Animation: Animation Studies 2.0, Society for Animation Studies (SAS) Blog, Dec 3, 2014.