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University of Pittsburgh

Faculty

Kun Qian

Assistant Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Film

 

Office Location

703 Old Engineering Hall
Phone: 412-624-5577
Fax: 412-624-3458
E-mail: qiankun@pitt.edu

Office Hours

Thursday 1:30 - 3:30 pm and other times by appointment

Education

  • Ph.D., East Asian Literature, Cornell University
  • M.A., Asian Studies, Cornell University
  • M.S., Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University
  • B.A., Economics, Beijing University, China

Research

I came to the United States to study economics and finance. Like many young people, I was following my parents’ expectations, intending to become a financial expert. Yet a deeply ingrained love for literature and culture eventually drew me to the field of modern Chinese literature and film. I am most interested in the conjunction of history and literature, taking literary/visual text as a creative site of contested ideologies and discourses, historical consciousness and unconscious, and individual subjectivity and collective agency. I try to discern a paradigmatic pattern of historical thinking beneath the symptomatic manifestations of literature in different time periods. My current research project deals with the ways modern writers and producers have represented pre-modern Chinese empires. Through close readings of the texts in relation to historical contexts, I suggest that revolutionary change and historical continuity have both shaped the imaginations of Chinese Empire, and a deeply-rooted historical way of thinking has helped define reality. In the field of media studies, I am drawn to the relationship between visuality and identity, in particular, the question of how the minority groups (including women, ethnic minorities, and marginal groups in the society) are represented in media, and how these unstable representations are constitutive elements of their identity formation in an increasingly connected global context.

Recent Publications

  • “Tracing Desire: Cell Phone and the Self-Reflexivity of Contemporary Chinese Media,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC) Resource Center, May 2011. Available online: http://mclc.osu.edu/rc/pubs/qian.htm

  • “Pandora’s Box: Time-Image in A Chinese Odyssey and the Becoming of Chinese Cinema,” Asian Cinema, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 2011): 308-328.

  • “Love or Hate: The First Emperor on Screen,” Asian Cinema, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2009): 39-67.

  • "The Imperial-Time Regime: The Chinese Empire in the Age of Globalization," Journal of the Southwest Conference on Asian Studie, Volume 6, 2008, 132-153.

Works in progress

  • Empire without End: Imperial History Printed, Staged, and Screened in Modern China, 1900 to the Present. A book project.

  • “Tianxia Revisited: Family and Empire on the Television Screen,” an article in an edited volume.

  • “The Catastrophic Condition: AIDS and Desire in Gu Changwei’s Film Love For Life,” an article in an edited volume.