Belinda Qian He
Assistant Professor of Sinophone Cinema and Media Studies, School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Assistant Professor of Sinophone , Cinema and Media Studies
Assistant Professor, Chinese
Affiliate Professor, The Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
2106E Jiménez Hall
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Education
Ph.D., Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington, Seattle
Research Expertise
Art and Social Change
Digital Activism
East Asia
Film studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
Law
Media Studies
Performance Studies
Political Violence
Belinda Qian He is an assistant professor in East Asian and Cinema & Media Studies and an affiliate faculty member in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. She received her Ph.D. in cinema and media studies (CMS) from the University of Washington, Seattle. Before joining the ARHU-SLLC faculty at UMD, she worked as a CCS Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and taught in the Department of Film and Media studies at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Washington Seattle. Dr. Hé's work lies at the intersection of film/media studies, art history, and legal humanities, exploring the role of film, photography, and video in policing, punishing, and justice making, with a focus on image circulation of and as violence over space, through time, and across scale. She pays specific attention to the history of East Asian and global cinema, exhibitions, and participatory media, associated with atrocity, witnessing, sexual violence and trauma.
Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals such as Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and edited volumes, including The Child in World Cinema (Lexington Books, 2018), Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization (HKU Press, 2022), and Global Movie Magazine Networks (UC Press, 2024). Her in-progress book project Expose and Punish: Trial by Moving Images in Chinese Revolutionary Times has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) & Library of Congress, Asia Art Archive, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, and Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, among others.
She co-edited a special double issue titled "A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia" for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas. As a collaborator since 2020, she has contributed to the Global/Chinese Cinema collection of the Media History Digital Library at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her engagement spans academia, media industry, and the art world, extending to experimental film production and curatorial responsibilities for film festivals, archives, and digital humanities projects.
Courses
Fall 2023 Where Truth Lies: Cinema between Fact and Fiction
Spring 2024 Chinese Cinemas and the Underground
Fall 2024 Chinese Machines, Global Media