Background Matters

Weihong Bao is Pamela P. Fong and Family Distinguished Chair in China Studies and an Associate Professor of Film and Media, UC Berkeley. She has published widely on comparative media history and theory, media and environment, early cinema, war and modernity, affect theory, propaganda theory and practice, and Chinese language cinema of all periods and regions. Her book Fiery Cinema: The Emergence of an Affective Medium in China, 1915-1945 (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) received an honorable mention for the Modernist Studies Association Best Book Prize in 2016. Her more recent work explores the relationship between medium and environment, by engaging intellectual history, political theory, cultural anthropology, and comparative media theory. On this subject she has co-edited two special issues on “Media/Climates" (Representations) and "Medium/Environment" (Critical Inquiry); she has also completed a new book, “Background Matters: Set Design and The Art of Environment” (forthcoming from the University of California Press).

She has held fellowships from the Getty Research Institute, the Internationale Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphilosophie (IKKM), Germany, the University of Melbourne, Australia, Freie Universität Berlin, Ludwig-Maximilians Universität München, the National Humanities Center, the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and the Suzy Newhouse Center for the Humanities. She was the editor-in-chief for The Journal of Chinese Cinemas(2017-2023) and currently co-edits Grey Room and the “film theory in media history” book series published by Amsterdam University Press. She also serves on the editorial board for Representations, Discourse, Journal of Visual Culture and Feminist Media History.