Yvonne Lin

Yvonne Lin is a PhD Candidate in Chinese with Designated Emphases in Film & Media and in Critical Theory. Her dissertation, “The Aestheticization of Pastness in Postsocialist Chinese Media,” theorizes historicity as aesthetic form in Chinese visual culture from the late 20th century to the 21st century. Through close analyses of works of film and photography, she argues these mediated encounters with the past index four aesthetic modes of historical temporalities in postsocialist China: decay, banality, recursive spectrality, and interruption. She is more broadly interested in new media, photography, global postsocialisms, translation and dubbing, and cinema in China and Taiwan. She is developing a secondary project on trash and cinema in Taiwan. Her studies and research have been supported by the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation, the Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowships, and the UC Berkeley Center for Chinese Studies.

Yvonne has taught undergraduate classes in East Asian cinema, film history, media studies, modern Chinese literature, reading and composition, and Chinese language. From 2019-2021, she was co-organizer of the Translation Studies Working Group. She is currently co-Editor-in-Chief of Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences and on the editorial board of its creative-critical online pendant Ki.  

Prior to the PhD, Yvonne received an M.St. in Oriental Studies from Oxford University and a B.A. in Comparative Literature and French from UC Berkeley, where her undergraduate scholarship was recognized with the Theresa Hak Kyung Cha Award in Comparative Literature.