Julia Keblinksa

BSc (Georgetown), MA (Columbia), PhD (California Berkeley)

College roles

Fellow (A)
Special Supervisor in Modern & Medieval Languages (Film)

University roles

Assistant Professor of Asian Film and Media, Film and Screen Studies, Faculty of Modern & Medieval Languages and Linguistics

Biography

Dr Julia Keblinska, assistant professor in Asian film and media, Cambridge Film and Screen, is a television, media, and film scholar and multilingual comparativist who studies global postsocialism in the East Asian and Eastern European context. As a historian and theorist of film and media, she works at the intersection of multiple fields: film and media studies, literary and cultural studies, visual culture, and science & technology studies.

Dr Julia Keblinska began learning about Chinese cinema as an undergraduate studying foreign affairs and international economics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. After completing a MA in Chinese Literature at Columbia University, she went on to pursue a PhD in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was also affiliated with the Department of Film and Media Studies. Upon finishing her doctoral degree in 2021, Dr Keblinska took on a postdoctoral research position at the Ohio State University (OSU), where she became the content co-editor of the Chinese Theater Collaborative, a pioneering digital humanities project that combines the study of Chinese theater with the concerns of media studies. She arrives at Cambridge and Newnham College excited to engage new collaborators, scholars, undergraduate and graduate students, and practitioners alike, to the study of film and media.

As a teacher and researcher alike, Dr Julia Keblinska investigates the mutually constituting relationship between the development of new media technologies and historical change by focusing on the temporality and materiality of media. Her first monograph project, New Era, New Media: Reverse Engineering the Future in 1980s China, is a media history that explores how residual and emergent media forms like comics, television, cinema, and video, anticipated and managed the uneven material and sociopolitical transformations of China’s market reforms. A second book project, tentatively titled Cold War Aesthetics, concerns the emergence of the historical Cold War as a thematic element in contemporary blockbuster film and television production against the return of the Cold War as a contemporary geopolitical idiom. Dr Keblinska looks forward to continuing work on her ongoing research and developing new projects and programming in conversation with colleagues and students at Cambridge.