I have taught:
At McGill University:
Advanced Seminar in Selected Themes and Issues in Chinese Film: Postsocialist Chinese Film (Instructor of Record, Winter 2024)—a seminar on the incredible films Chinese filmmakers have made in the period after 1976, as they have sought to position their filmmaking practice among state institutions, global arthouse circuits, and international and domestic markets. Watching films by Ning Ying, Jia Zhangke, and Feng Xiaogang, we discussed the problems of film realism, the question of “popular” or “entertainment” film, and the meaning of censorship. For their final projects, students produced “mini film festivals” with such themes as Chinese-American films about immigration and contemporary Chinese animation.
Introduction to Film History (co-taught with Alanna Thain, Winter 2024)—an intro course on a century of film outside of Europe and the United States. We highlighted some general problems in global film and film history, and sketched out a history of film as a medium for modernity, globalization, identity, revolution, and resistance. I taught the emergence of a film language in Teinosuke Kinugasa’s A Page of Madness and the traces of empire in Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid. I also designed a reception analysis exercise that had students analyzing the surprising first responses in the US to the Japanese trans film classic Funeral Parade of Roses, and comparing those responses to the fan consensus one can find on Letterboxd.
Asian Genre Cinema (Instructor of Record, Fall 2023)—a course on popular Asian film, from wuxia to gangster films to J-Horror to the big lizard herself, as well as the industries that produce and distribute those films, and the audiences that consume them. Students finished the course with very strong opinions on Bong Joon-ho, queer subtexts in HK gangster film, and what makes a movie monster and what those monsters might mean.
Advanced Topics in Chinese Studies: Beyond the Sea—Literature and Film across the Sinophone World (Instructor of Record, Fall 2023)—a seminar on the problems of the “Sinophone,” the world of self-identified Chinese living overseas, or people who are identified by others as Chinese, or people who live in China but do not necessarily identify as Chinese—in short, people who have a relationship with China that is complicated, but difficult to avoid. Concretely, we watched Tsai Ming-liang and Wong Kar-wai, and read Li Zishu and Chu T’ien-wen. Students had the opportunity to talk directly to a contemporary Hong Kong writer and her translator, they debated the aesthetics of the Taiwanese indie game Detention, and they worked out uncannily familiar problems of identity, minority languages, and the immigrant experience through the experience of Sinophone writers and filmmakers.
At the University of Hong Kong:
Digital Cultures (Instructor of Record, Spring 2022)—A course on how artists across the world have conceptualized and represented the “digital,” from big data to artificial intelligence to virtual reality to social media, and the way our lives, our societies, and our identities have produced and been produced by these technologies. Students submitted “memes of the week” and digital ethnographies of Chinese fandoms of Japanese radio shows organized on Twitter. We read Karel Čapek’s R.U.R. and puzzled over the meaning of “intelligence,” and we used Lionel Trilling’s concepts of sincerity and authenticity to make sense of the performances of Chinese livestreamers.
Comparative Studies of Literary and Visual Narratives (Instructor of Record, Spring 2021)—A course I designed to teach intermediate-level comparative literature students how to understand texts as media; that is, how to analyze the materiality of a text and the systems that shape production, circulation, and reception. We watched modern Javanese shadow plays, listened to recordings of Kamau Brathwaite performing his poetry, and explored Cao Fei’s RMB City in Second Life. My students produced a host of remarkable papers applying what they learned to the M+ Collection in Hong Kong that I wish I could share with everyone.
At University of Washington, Tacoma
History: Modern China (Instructor of Record, Spring 2019)—A course that I developed and taught myself, introducing students to the discipline of history and to two hundred years in the history of a very complicated place through poetry, podcasts, and propaganda posters. My students enjoyed my demonstration of the proper way to pull a rickshaw, and using the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 50 Twitter feed to think about the relationship between media and political violence.
History: Modern East Asia (Instructor of Record, Fall 2018)—A course that I developed and taught myself that covered about two hundred years of the history of almost two billion people in ten weeks, and, along the way, hopefully taught my students something about how to do history too. We visited the Tacoma Chinese Reconciliation Park, and came up with plans for memorials for traumatic moments in East Asian history.
At Harvard University
Culture and Belief 33: East Asian Religions (Teaching Fellow, Spring 2017)—A course that served as an introduction to both the East Asian religious traditions of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucian ritual, and Shintoism, and to the study of religion in general, covering hermeneutic approaches to texts, religious artifacts, and ritual practices. I enjoyed showing my students Taiwanese San Taizi videos, using my morning coffee to illustrate the doctrine of Śūnyatā, and summarizing chapter one of the Platform Sutra as "we started from the bottom, now we're here."
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 47: Forbidden Romance in Modern China (Head Teaching Fellow, Fall 2016)—A course focusing on the discourses of love, sex, and sexuality in twentieth-century Chinese literature that incorporated literature and scholarship based in queer, feminist, postcolonial, and new historicist theoretical frameworks. In my guest lecture on Ding Ling, I acted out Hu Yepin raising his handcuffed hands to say goodbye to his wife for the last time.
ChinaX Book Club: Five Novelists, Five Novels, Five Views of China (Content Editor and Teaching Assistant, Fall 2016)—I helped develop the reading guides, annotations, essay prompts, discussion questions and a comprehensive glossary for this massive online course. I'm the voice you hear explaining how to do a close reading. I also participated in video "office hour" segments where David Der-wei Wang and I responded to student questions. I eventually figured out what to do with my hands while on camera.
Aesthetic and Interpretive Understanding 39: Chinese Stories (Sole Teaching Fellow, Fall 2015)—A co-taught core introductory course that brought together premodern and modern literature—prose, poetry, drama, and film—to introduce students to the problems of adaptation and the continuing role of tradition in shaping modern Chinese culture. I developed this interactive map of all the locations mentioned in Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain.