Margaret Hillenbrand

Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture
margaret.hillenbrand@chinese.ox.ac.uk

Position:

Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Visual Culture; Fellow of Wadham College 

Faculty / College Address:

China Centre / Wadham College

Email:

margaret.hillenbrand@chinese.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

My research focusses on literary and visual culture in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, especially cultures of protest and secrecy. My most recent book is On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China (Columbia University Press, 2023), research for which was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2020-2021) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2021-2023). I am now working on a new project about the cultural politics of the face in Chinese visual culture during the era of biometric surveillance, cosmetic surgery, and masked protest.

Selected Publications:

Books

  • On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in China, New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. 408pp. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/on-the-edge/9780231212151  

         Awarded the Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies, Modern Languages Association of America, 2024.

[Podcasts/interviews about this book: China Digital Times: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2024/02/interview-margaret-hillenbrand-on-her-books-on-the-edge-2023-and-negative-exposures-2020/; Made in China Journal: https://madeinchinajournal.com/2023/11/15/on-the-edge-a-conversation-with-margaret-hillenbrand/; New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/on-the-edge; View: Theories and Practices of Visual Culture: https://www.pismowidok.org/en/archive/2023/37-images-of-exhaustion/the-hostile-proximity-of-classes; Table Media: https://table.media/en/china/interview/people-are-afraid-of-slipping-into-zombie-citizenship/​​​​​​; Asiascape: Digital Asia: https://brill.com/view/journals/dias/11/1-2/article-p137_8.xml]

  • Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 320pp. https://www.dukeupress.edu/negative-exposures

[Podcasts/interviews about this book: New Books Network: https://newbooksnetwork.com/margaret-hillenbrand-negative-exposures-knowing-what-not-to-know-in-contemporary-china-duke-up-2020; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9n2fHyxw8k; China Digital Times: https://chinadigitaltimes.net/2024/02/interview-margaret-hillenbrand-on-her-books-on-the-edge-2023-and-negative-exposures-2020/]

  • Documenting China: An Interpretive Reader in Seminal Twentieth-Century Texts (with Chloë Starr), Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011. 240 pp.  
     
  • Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990, Leiden: Brill, 2007. 362 pp.  

[Partly translated into Chinese as “Chongshen Meiguo baquan”, trans. Chang Yu-min, Tu Hsin-hsin, and Cheng Hui-wen, in Li Sher-shiueh (ed.), Yidi fanhua: haiwai Taiwan wenxue wenlun xuanyi, vol. 2, Taibei: National Taiwan University Press, 2012, 229-320].

Edited special issues

  • Guest editor, The Colour of Chinese Cinemas, special issue of Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6/3 (2012). 
  • Guest editor, Contemporary East Asia, in Theory, special issue of Postcolonial Studies 13/4 (2010). 

Journal articles

  • "Portals to the Soul: Facial Recognition Technologies and Chinese Portraiture", Critical Inquiry (forthcoming, 2025).
  • “The Cliffhangers: Suicide Shows and the Aesthetics of Protest in China”, Cultural Politics 16/2 (2020): 147-170.
  • "Selling the Cryptosphere in China", Cultural Studies 34/4 (2020): 625-655.
  • "Ragpicking as Method", Prism: Theory and Modern Chinese Literature 16/2 (2019): 260-297. 
  • “Remaking Tank Man, in China”, Journal of Visual Culture 16/2 (2017): 127-166.
  • “Letters of Penance: Writing America in Chinese and the Location of Chinese American Literature", MELUS 38/3 (2013): 44-66 [Recipient of the Katherine Newman best essay award from the Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the US. Link to feature on Oxford University Press blog: http://blog.oup.com/2014/02/chinese-american-literature-in-chinese-language/].
  • “Hero, Kurosawa, and a Cinema of Synaesthesia”, Screen 54/2 (2013): 127-151[Chinese translation: “Yingxiong, Heize Ming he ganguan dianying”, trans. Chen Ziru, Dongwu xueshu (Soochow Academic) 6 (2017): 91-108].
  • “Chromatic Expressionism in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas”, Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6/3 (2012): 211-231.
  • “Communitarianism, or, How to Build East Asian Theory”, Postcolonial Studies 13/4 (2010): 317-334.
  • “Nostalgia, Place, and Making Peace with Modernity in East Asia”, Postcolonial Studies 13/4 (2010): 383-402 [Reprinted in Jeroen de Kloet and Lena Scheen (eds.), Spectacle and the City: Urbanity in Popular Culture and Art in East Asia, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013].
  • “Murakami Haruki in Greater China: Creative Responses and the Quest for Cosmopolitanism”, Journal of Asian Studies 68/3 (2009): 715-747.
  • “Of Myths and Men: Better Luck Tomorrow and the Mainstreaming of Asian America Cinema”, Cinema Journal 47/4 (2008): 50-75 [Reprinted in Kathryn Karrh Cashin and Stacy Lynn Tanner (eds.), Multicultural Film: An Anthology, Boston: Pearson Publishing, 2011].
  • “Doppelgängers, Misogyny, and the San Francisco System: the Occupation Narratives of Ôe Kenzaburô”, Journal of Japanese Studies 33/2 (2007): 383-414.
  • “The National Allegory Revisited: Writing Private and Public in Contemporary Taiwan”, positions: east asia cultures critique 14/3 (2006): 633-662 [Chinese translation: “Guojia yuyan zaitan: dangdai Taiwan de gongzhong yu simi shuxie”, trans. Chang Hsueh-mei, in Chiu Tzu-hsiu (ed.), Kua wenhua de xiangxiang zhutixing: Taiwan houzhimin/nüxing yanjiu lunshu, Taibei: National Taiwan University Press, 2012, 295-332].
  • “Trauma and the Politics of Identity: Form and Function in Narratives of the February 28th Incident”, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17/2 (2005): 49-89.

Book chapters

  • “Analog, Digital, Apparatus: The Photography of Ren Hang,” in Carlos Rojas, Jinying Li, and Yomi Braester (eds.), Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media, Oxford University Press, in press.
  • “Voices of Empire in Dubliners and Taibeiren” in Shu-mei Shih and Ping-hui Liao (eds.), Comparatizing Taiwan, New York and London: Routledge, 2014, 175-201.
  • “The Personals: Backward Glances, Knowing Looks, and the Voyeur Film” in Chris Berry (ed.), Chinese Films in Focus 2, London, British Film Institute, 2008, 175-81.

Translations

Japanese

  • “Kubi to karada” (Head and Body) by Wu Yongfu, tr. M. Hillenbrand, Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 19: Special Issue on Taiwan Literature During the Period of Japanese Rule (2006): 39-49.

Chinese

  • “Gu’er de yanjing. Wu Zhuoliu youjizhong de ziwo ningshi yu tazhe xiangxiang” (The Eyes of an Orphan: Gazing at the Self and Imagining the Other in the Travel Diaries of Wu Zhuoliu) by Jian Yiming, tr. M. Hillenbrand, Taiwan Literature: English Translation Series 15: Special Issue on Wu Zhuoliu (2004): 199-240.

Further Info:

Book series editor

East Asian Cinemas, Edinburgh University Press, 2012-:

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-edinburgh-studies-in-east-asian-film.html 

Seminar series

Convenor of the Oxford Seminar on Visual Culture in Modern and Contemporary China

Current and recent D.Phil. students

Kate Costello: “Writing Between Languages: Rethinking Bilingualism in Contemporary Chinese Literature”

Annabella Massey: “Cities of the Mind: New Urban Imaginaries in Contemporary Chinese Literary and Visual Culture”

Flair Donglai Shi: “The Yellow Peril Discourse in Anglophone and Sinophone Literatures, 1895 to the Present: Mutations, Reactions, and Reincarnations” (co-supervisor)

Xiaochu Wu: “The Aesthetics of Contemporary Chinese Feature Film”

Min Hui Yeo: “Working with the Other: Connections between the Malay- and Chinese-language Cinemas and Film Industries (1950s-1980s)"

Linqing Zhu: “Landscapes of the Heart”: Pictorial, Calligraphic, and Literary Traditions in Contemporary Chinese Film"

Hao Wang: "Imagining the World in Sinophone Literature and Visual Arts during WWII"

Aoife Cantrill: "Translating Kōminka: Shaping Narrative of Japanese Rule in Taiwan through Translation Post-1975"

Ziru Chen: "The Sensory Aesthetic of Contemporary East Asian Art Cinema"

Billy Beswick: "Intra-National Becoming: The Relational Construction of Ethnic and National Identity in the Visual and Literary Cultures of Taiwan and Tibet"

Julius Kochan: "The Semiotics of the Skin in Contemporary China"

Han Sun: "Writing on the Wall: Silent Resistance in Contemporary China"