Xinyu Dong is Assistant Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and specializes in Chinese-language cinemas (including mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese diaspora). With a focus on film genres as traveling forms, her work identifies the often hidden historical interactions between Hollywood genres and international art cinema and between cinema and other artistic media, thus emphasizing the changing notions of art in different cultural, historical, and media contexts.

Professor Dong’s first book, Between Seeing and Being Seen: A Cultural History of Chinese Silent Cinema (2000), examines Shanghai cinema’s gravitation toward melodrama during the silent era through broad transnational and art historical perspectives. Her recent book, The Comic Avant-garde: A Forgotten History of Chinese Cinema and Interwar Modernism (forthcoming 2017), excavates Chinese filmmakers’ avant-garde experiments through the genre of comedy during the interwar period. Her current project, "Ernst Lubitsch Goes to China: The Art of Ellipsis in the Age of World Cinema," looks at the creative reception of Ernst Lubitsch’s films by the "Peking Opera generation" of Chinese filmmakers and explores ellipsis as a genre-sensitive artistic device that thrives on cross-cultural and intermedial practices. Her work has appeared in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, The Opera Quarterly, and Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, and she is currently co-editing (with Jonathan Rosenbaum) a comedy special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, scheduled for publication in 2018.

Professor Dong’s research has received support from the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago, the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, the IHUM Postdoctoral Fellowship at Stanford University, the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University, the Reischauer Institute for Japanese Studies at Harvard University, and the Rockefeller Foundation Asian Cultural Council.