2 Sep 2025
Cambridge Film and Screen is delighted to announce that we have recently hired two new Assistant Professors.
Dr. Julia Keblinska has been appointed as Assistant Professor in Asian Film and Media, and Dr. Stefan Tarnowski has been appointed as Assistant Professor in Digital Humanities and Film and Screen Studies, a position shared with our colleagues at the Centre for Digital Humanities. These appointments result from and respond to the growth of postgraduate study in Film and Screen Studies at Cambridge over the past several years. Julia’s and Stefan’s research and teaching will greatly expand the scope of our expertise, contributing to work across the School of Arts and Humanities to broaden the study of film and media in a global context. We look forward to welcoming them here soon!
Julia Keblinska is a television, media, and film scholar and multilingual comparativist who studies global postsocialism with a focus on China. She works at the intersection of multiple fields: film and media studies, Chinese literary and cultural studies, visual culture, and science & technology studies. She received her PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures, with a Designated Emphasis in Film and Media, from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. Upon graduating, she joined the Ohio State University as a postdoc working on the theme of “crisis” in East European and East Asian media history. This position introduced her to the critical paradigm of the “global East” and expanded the scope of her teaching and research to explicitly include East European film and media. Broadly, her current research investigates the relationship between the emergence of new media, the persistence of residual forms, and historical change in socialist and postsocialist China. Julia is currently working on two monograph projects, one on the media ecology of the Chinese 1980s and a second on the reemergence of the Cold War in contemporary Chinese media and political cultures. She is also the co-editor of a pioneering digital humanities site on modern adaptations and remediations of classical Chinese theatre. As both a teacher and researcher, she works broadly on East Asian popular culture. She has published on South Korean television dramas and has two forthcoming chapters on reading and remediation in 1980s Chinese comics and VCD technics and aesthetics in 1990s media culture in China.
Stefan Tarnowski is a sociocultural anthropologist working across the disciplinary traditions of film and media studies, digital humanities, political theory, and postcolonial studies. Alongside an Early-Career Research Fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Copenhagen as part of the ‘Views of Violence — Images as Documentary, Evidentiary, and Affective’ project. His ethnographic fieldwork examines the relationship between digital media activism and the authoritative fields of journalism, humanitarianism, law, and cinema. His book manuscript, provisionally titled “The Activist Subject: Media Infrastructures, Epistemic Murk, and Plausible Deniability during Syria’s Revolution and War,” is under pre-contract with the University of Chicago Press. The book follows how activists and experts attempted to find social and technical solutions to the problems of doubt, uncertainty, and deniability in the wake of the Syrian state banning entry to authoritative foreign journalists and observers. Stefan has been an affiliated lecturer at the Centre for Film and Screen, Centre for Digital Humanities, Department of Social Anthropology, and Faculty of Asian and Middle East Studies. He received his doctorate from Columbia University’s Anthropology Department, with additional certificates from the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the Centre for Comparative Media. His research has been published in Visual Anthropology, American Ethnologist, World Records Journal, and Film Quarterly, among others. He writes regularly for public-facing outlets, including the London Review of Books (mainly the blog), and the New York Review of Books. He has also worked as a researcher and subtitler for a number of artists and filmmakers.