
Affiliated Professor of Cinema Studies
AY 2014-15
Email:zz6@nyu.edu
Room 1242
Office Phone: +86 (21) 20595125
Zhen Zhang is affiliate associate professor of cinema studies and history at NYU Shanghai. She is also director and founder of the Asian Film and Media Initiative at the Department of Cinema Studies at NYU. She holds a PhD from the University of Chicago and an MA from the University of Iowa.
Zhang’s research interests are Chinese film history (including China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong), melodrama, childhood, feminism/gender, and independent cinema. Her books include An Amorous History of the Silver Screen: Shanghai Cinema 1896-1937 (“Honorable Mention for the First Book” by the Modern Languages Association); (editor of) The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century; (coeditor of) DV-Made China: Digital Subjects and Social Transformation (forthcoming); and a poetry collection, Mengzhong Louge (Dream Loft) (China, 1998).
Zhang is the recipient of an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities (1998-1999), the Society of Cinema Studies Dissertation Award (2000), a J.P. Getty Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History of Art and the Humanities (2001-2002), and a National Endowments for the Humanities Summer Stipend (2006).
Research Interests
- Film history and historiography
- Mass culture and urban modernity
- Gender and media
- Independent cinema, documentary, and experimental film/art
- Melodrama
- Childhood studies
Courses Taught
- History of Chinese Cinemas
- History of Chinese Cinemas II
- Screening Childhood
Education
- PhD, Chinese Literature and Film
University of Chicago, 1998 - MA, Comparative Literature
University of Iowa, 1993 - BA, Humanities
Temple University, Tokyo, Japan, 1991