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Cassandra Guan works on the history of animation with a special focus on the co-evolution of modernist aesthetics and new media technologies, particularly in the context of life sciences. Her research underscores the material entanglements of political modernist cinema and its transnational permutations, framed within a 'bioanalytic' paradigm. She is currently finishing a book project entitled 'Maladaptive Media: Plasticity of Life in the Era of Technical Reproducibility,' which argues for a radical transformation of animation aesthetics during the interwar period. This transformation, taking place across film, radio, and print amidst the global proliferation of mass communication networks, revealed a crisis in the relations to the living environment. The book offers a new approach to questions of animation spectatorship, re-evaluating the pitched intellectual battles surrounding the conceptualization of life while postulating a corresponding rupture in the history of audio-visual forms. Guan received her PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University. Prior to her appointment in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies, she was a recipient of the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) and held a faculty position with the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. As a filmmaker and scholar, Guan is involved in experimental documentary film productions, with her latest project, 'Tender Comrades,' exploring the ambiguities of gender in female friendship within left-wing cinemas in mainland China. This project received the Electronic Media Film Finishing Funds Award from the New York State Council on the Arts.
Department of Philosophy