Dai Jinhua is Founder and Director of the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies and Film Studies at Peking University, where she is also Professor of Chinese Literature and Language.  She is a prominent cultural scholar of literature, film, and popular culture. With Meng Yue, she wrote the 1989 Emerging on the Horizon of History, one of the first works of feminist scholarship published in reform-era China.  Her work as a film scholar and media critic questions the social legitimacy of consumer culture in China, while problematizing the elitist lineage of Western Marxism and reflecting on Chinese modes of intellectual endeavor during the last three decades. Dai Jinhua’s publications include Film Theory and Criticism, Gendering China, Cinema and Desire, and Scenery in the Fog: Chinese Cinema Culture 1978-1988.   The Encyclopedia of Contemporary Chinese Culture comments of her work, “Her innovative experiments with different critical approaches and the feminist perspective with which she re-examined dominant theories of literature, film and popular culture introduced a new way of critical analysis far beyond her field in China. The development of her own dynamic cultural critique also addressed a growing audience in Taiwan, Hong Kong and the West.”

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