Chuanhui Meng is a Watson China Initiative postdoctoral research associate in the Department of East Asian Studies at Brown University. Her areas of specialization include modern and contemporary Chinese film and media, with particular interests in transnational film genres, border-crossing circulations of film and media in the global 1950s and 1960s, as well as ecocritical studies of socialist and postsocialist China. Her current book project examines the formation of a "genre ecology" in socialist Chinese cinema of the 1950s and 1960s. It examines both domestic experiments and the transnational constellation, circulation, and translation of film genres across Cold War geopolitical borders, redefining genre as an environmental and liminal space that connects the domestic cultural-political ecology with global movements of film forms, criticism, and technologies. Her work has appeared in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and The Journal of Asian Studies.
She teaches courses on modern and contemporary Chinese literature, film, and media, with a focus on transnational and comparative perspectives. She also offers courses that engage with contemporary issues such as environmental challenges, the politics of new media and digital platforms, and changing conceptions of the human in postsocialist China under global neoliberal capitalism.
