Dr. Julia Keblinska is a postdoctoral scholar at the East Asian Studies Center at the Ohio State University. She has previously been an “Archival Imaginations” fellow of the OSU Global Arts and Humanities Society of Fellows and a postdoc focused on crisis in East Asian and Eastern European postsocialist transitions at OSU’s Center for Historical Research. She holds a PhD in Chinese (with a Designated Emphasis in Film & Media) from the University of California, Berkeley.

Julia writes primarily on modern Chinese media history but is broadly interested in late socialist media ecologies in Eastern Europe and East Asian popular culture. Her first book project, “New Era, New Media: Reverse Engineering the Future in 1980s China,” is a popular media archaeology of China’s era of market reforms. Her article, “Mediated Nostalgia: Touching the Past in Reply 1994” (Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinemas), turns to South Korean TV drama to investigate the complex temporality of television as both a new and outdated medium. Two forthcoming chapters in edited volumes, “Reading Pulp Futures in New Era China” and “Compacted Copies and Street Circuits: The Forms, Formats, and Infrastructures of VCD Piracy,” theorize the affordances of cheap media during moments of technological transition in the early 1980s and late 1990s, respectively.

In addition to her solo publications, Julia is involved in several collaborative research projects. At OSU, together with Patricia Sieber (OSU), the project’s founding editor, she is the content co-editor of the Chinese Theater Collaborative, a forthcoming digital humanities project that connects the dots between China’s written theatrical corpus and its modern adaptations of stage, screen, and other media. In addition to her work as an editor, she has contributed modules on comics, films, and cigarette cards that adapt Chinese stage plays to the project. Julia is also a guest co-editor, with Evelyn Shih (UC Boulder), of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas devoted to “noise.” She is co-developing an experimental sourcebook and methods guide titled Paper Archive, a print and digital pedagogical resource that conceptualizes modern Chinese print culture in terms of media ecology. Together with her co-author, Xiaoyu Xia (Princeton), she is currently busy writing a chapter on “pocket archives” for the project.

At OSU, Julia has worked with various centers to organize events and build intellectual community across area studies disciplines. In 2022, she organized a comparative, interdisciplinary, and international symposium “Media & Materiality: Category Crisis and Transitional Moments in East Asia and Eastern Europe.” As an affiliate of the Center for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies and a recipient of a 2022 Polish Studies Initiative Grant, she hosted an online campus event that explored the meanings of “pulpy postsocialism” in Poland’s 1990s. She is currently working with the East Asian Studies Center on a series of talks that consider “Asian Futures” vis à vis questions of technology which will culminate in a spring symposium. Additionally, she has developed extensive guides for teaching East Asian cinema in high school and college classrooms for EASC.

Julia’s teaching experience includes survey courses on premodern and modern Chinese literature and culture as well as many classes of her own design on Chinese and East Asian media cultures. She has taught graduate courses on media theory, media & nostalgia, and Cold War media cultures in East Asia and Eastern Europe. At Berkeley, she developed and implemented undergraduate research writing courses in the departments of History of Art, Film & Media, and East Asian Languages and Cultures. These classes have focused on media and trash, propaganda, seriality, nostalgia, and the Sinophone Cold War. Julia is currently excited to be teaching a graduate methodology and professionalization seminar in East Asian studies and looking forward to teaching two spring courses, one on contemporary Chinese history and one on Chinese cinema.