Felicia Chan
RCUK Fellow in Film, Media and Transnational Cultures
Email: felicia.chan@manchester.ac.uk
Areas of research
Cross-cultural, transnational and 'world' cinemas, film festival cultures, culture and technology, theories of intertextuality, diaspora and identity politics, and modernism and modernity in film, literature and culture
Research project
My main area of research is in transnational and transcultural cinema, and cosmopolitanism provides the framework under which both the transnational and the transcultural may be addressed. My approach is to address cinema as a priori transnational and transcultural, rather than to address the transnational or transcultural as a corollary of a body of texts we understand to be 'cinema', for cinema as an industrial cultural product is almost always produced and received in a transnational and transcultural context. In that respect, cinema's very undertaking problematises conceptions of culture and identities defined by geo-political boundaries.
My research is currently being undertaken in twin strands: the first is the continued textual and aesthetic study of films with regard to the nature of cultural translatability and literacy, and the second is a study of the role of international film festivals, not so much in line with reception theory and audience studies, but in terms of festival cultures and their relation to the city hosting it. Film festivals are, in many ways, expressions of cosmopolitan desires. The transcultural experience of cinema is largely experienced in cosmopolitan centres - that is, in cities with arthouse theatres, and at international film festivals held in these cities - that may, or may not address the spectator either as foreigner or native. Indeed, the cosmopolitan may be neither or both. In that respect, cross-cultural films oft-times perform their border crossing for an audience that is expected to be able to acknowledge it as such. Part of that acknowledgement also stems from accepting that there are cultural or linguistic factors that prevent one from complete understanding of the material at hand. In order to theorise such an encounter, it is important not just to locate the study of transcultural cinema within the context of cosmopolitanism, but also for that scholarship to be likewise informed and inflected by notions of the cosmopolitan.
My blog is called Trans World Cultures.
Outreach
In collaboration with colleagues from the Confucius Institute at the University of Manchester, Manchester Metropolitan University, the University of Salford, the Chinese Arts Centre and the Cornerhouse, I am involved in establishing the Chinese Film Forum UK. The Forum aims to widen the audience for Chinese cinemas in Manchester and the Northwest, and the UK as a whole, by organising a number of activities including film series, festivals, and talks, in tandem with academic research in transnational Chinese cinemas.
Background
I graduated with a B.A. Hons. and M.A. in English Literature from the National University of Singapore, and a PhD from the Department of Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham. Before my appointment as RCUK Fellow at the University of Manchester, I was a Research Associate at the Centre for Media Research, University of Ulster.