Research Topic: Representing Spectrality: Time, Memory and Experience in Moving Image Installations
About
Chunyan (Rebecca) Fu is a PhD student at Cambridge Film and Screen, University of Cambridge, where her primary interest revolves around film aesthetics, continental philosophy, avant-garde/experimental cinema, and moving image installations in contemporary art. Previously, she completed her BA in Philosophy (2015–2019) at Nanjing University, China, where she also minored in art history and art theory. She received an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies with Distinction from the University of Cambridge (2019–2020).
Research
Chunyan’s academic works focus on the intersections between film, art and philosophy. Her doctoral project investigates contemporary moving image installations with a philosophically driven approach. Centring around the topics of time, memory and experience, the project explores the spectrality—a term inherited from Jacques Derrida’s work and also frequently appearing in Giorgio Agamben’s text—generated when the technical reproducibility of cinema meets the irreversible, living experience of an exhibition, representation meets presentation, cinematic time meets real time, and when the crystal of the past returns to the flux of the present.
Scholarships/Prizes
Jennings Prize (Wolfson College, 2020)
Conference papers
‘Reinventing Historical Memory: Tradition and Contemporariness in Yang Fudong’s Moving Image Installation’, 100 Years of Chinese Film & Screen: Past, Present, and Futures, University of Nottingham Ningbo China (UNNC), May 2021.
‘Image and Gesture: A Modernistic Vision in Weimar Visual Culture’, The 7th European Conference on Media, Communication & Film, The International Academic Forum (IAFOR), Jul 2020.
Other activities and roles
Chunyan works as a freelance translator. She co-translated The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, Volume II (Peter E. Gordon & Warren Breckman, Eds., Cambridge University Press, 2019) into a Chinese translation, which is to be published in 2022.
Chunyan is the content editor of a digital humanities publicity account, writing review articles for various projects in digital humanities and new media studies.
Chunyan is actively involved in film festivals and events. She has worked as a submission reviewer at the 40th Cambridge Film Festival and an intern at the 24th Shanghai International Film Festival.
