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Date
Time
5:15 pm to 7:00 pm
Venue
SOAS Main Building
Room
KLT

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In this event, we are delighted to host the launch of Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (EUP, 2024), a groundbreaking new volume edited by Chris Berry, Wafa Ghermanni, Corrado Neri, and Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley.

Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Rediscovered and Reconsidered (2024, EUP) is the first English anthology which presents diverse approaches to the vibrant commercial film industry known as Taiwanese-language cinema (taiyupian). 

After a long period of neglect, taiyupian are being restored and made available with subtitles. Taiwanese-language cinema was a cycle of over 1,000 dramatic feature films produced between the mid-1950s and early 1970s in the local Minnanhua Chinese language most commonly spoken in Taiwan, also known as 'Taiwanese' (taiyu). The rediscovery of Taiwanese-language cinema is stimulating new scholarship, both in Chinese in Taiwan and in other languages, which challenges our conventional understanding of Taiwanese film history and opens up new approaches to the film themselves. 

This book includes a mix of new English-language scholarship material with key essays by Taiwanese scholars newly translated from Chinese for the volume.

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Professor Chris Berry

Chris Berry is Professor of Film Studies at King’s College London. His curating work includes the 2011 Cultural Revolution in Cinema season in Vienna (with Katja Wiederspahn) and the Taiwan’s Lost Commercial Cinema: Recovered and Restored project (with the co-editors of this anthology). 

He has authored and edited numerous books, including China on Screen (2006), Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture (2016), Chinese Film Festivals: Sites of Translation (2017), Film and the Chinese Medical Humanities (2020), and many more.

Dr Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley

Ming-Yeh T. Rawnsley received her doctorate in communications studies. She is Research Associate at the Centre of Taiwan Studies, SOAS University of London. She is the editor-in-chief of the International Journal of Taiwan Studies (2018–present) and has published widely in both English and Chinese on cinema, media and democratisation in Taiwan. 

Her most recent publications include this anthology and Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media, 2nd Edition (2025).

Dr Adina Zemanek

Adina Zemanek holds a PhD in cultural anthropology and is an honorary lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire. She has explored media representations of white-collar womanhood and global mobility in the PRC, grassroots nation branding in Taiwan through graphic narratives and tourist souvenirs, and Taiwan-related citizen diplomacy in Europe. 

She is the author of Daughters of China and Citizens of the World. Women's Representations in Chinese Fashion Magazines (2013, in Polish). She has published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, positions: asia critique, China Perspectives, and is co-host for the podcast “Taiwan-on-Air” (New Books Network). She is currently working on an edited book on Sinophone comics to be published open access by De Gruyter.

Photo Credit: 《天字第一號》印刷海報。典藏者：國家電影及視聽文化中心。創用CC 姓名標示-非商業性-相同方式分享 3.0台灣（CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 TW）。發佈於《開放博物館（2025/02/02瀏覽）。

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