Dr Xinyi Wang
- Postdoctoral Affiliate
Contact
About
Dr. Xinyi Wang (she/her) is a Postdoctoral Affiliate in Film and French at the Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages and Linguistics. She holds a PhD in French and an MPhil in European, Latin American, and Comparative Literatures and Cultures from the University of Cambridge, and a BA in Chinese Language and Literature from Wuhan University.
Her research focuses on film and wider visual culture, spanning fiction, documentary, and experimental film, as well as photography and video art. Her articles have been published in academic journals and film magazines, and she has presented her research at international conferences, seminars, and public venues, including bookshops. From 2022 to 2023, she was a participant in the Laboratoire d’histoire permanente at the Centre Pompidou, Paris, where she exhibited an article and helped organize the Soirée Rosellini.
She is also a filmmaker, curator and poet. Her poem-film, documentary, and essay film have been screened at the Edinburgh International University Film Festival, as well as in Paris and Cambridge. She has curated short film programmes for the Queer East Film Festival, served as a pre-selector for the Watersprite and Sunderland Shorts film festivals, and introduced films for Lou Ye, moderated Q&A sessions with Chen Yu-hsun, and translated for Qin Dao, Bo Wang, Your Bros. in various film events at the Open City Documentary Festival, the ICA, Garden Cinema, and Picturehouse.
Dr. Wang is the co-founder of Cambridge Asia Cine-Encounters, a platform for emerging Asian women filmmakers to share their films, ideas, and experiences, bridging academia and the film industry. She welcomes different forms of collaborations on film and other visual culture.
Research
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Wang is interested in film studies, gender studies and philosophy, with a special focus on French Cinema and Sinophone Cinema. She is currently working on a project about Sino-French feminist visual culture from the 1950s to the present. This project examines feminist techniques and global interconnection of female visual artists, centring labour, sexuality and precarity. The project selects works by Xiao Zhuang, Huang Shuqin, Clara Law, Agnès Varda, and Marguerite Duras.
Her thesis Women Who Return: Revisiting the Figure of Odysseus in Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda conceptualises the ‘female Odysseus’ in film and gender studies: a female subjectivity beyond patriarchally confined norms. Through a re-examination of the exiled, post-WWII, and modern wandering women in selected films by Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda, it develops an interdisciplinary framework that synthesizes visual analysis with spatial, feminist, queer, and postcolonial theories, alongside intermedial and ecocritical approaches. Attending to marginalised voices and forms of movement, it envisages the female Odysseus’ wandering as a form of gendered agency, offering critical renegotiation of concepts like home, exile, and belonging. This investigation is cutting-edge and timely in relation to current questions of migration, displacement, and precarity.
PUBLICATIONS
Articles and Chapters in Books:
— “Revisiting Women’s Filmmaking Within and Beyond Taiwan New Cinema: Interview with Huang Yu-shan,” Film Quarterly, forthcoming 2026.
— “Lesbian Teen Song: A Song Sung Blue,” Sinophone Women’s Cinema and Women Filmmakers, edited by Kiki Tianqi Yu and Tze-lan D. Sang, Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming May 2026.
— “Precarity, Femininity, Community: Varda and China,” ReFocus: The Films of Agnès Varda, edited by Melissa Oliver-Powell and Natasha Farrell, Edinburgh University Press, in preparation.
— “Uncanny Visuality and Subversive Vagrancy: Urban Space in Leos Carax’s Les Amants du Pont-Neuf and Merde” (with Yi Song), ReFocus: The Films of Leos Carax, edited by James Slaymaker, Edinburgh University Press, in preparation.
Public Engagement Writing:
— “A Love of Summer Night Wind: Lesbian Odyssey in Incidental Journey,” Queer East Magazine, Issue 0, February 2026, pp.62-65.
Reviews:
— “Modern European cinema and love. By Richard Rushton,” French Studies, Vol. 78, Issue 4, October 2024, pp. 739–740.