Panelists

Panel 1 Panelists

Jon Cowans (Rutgers University-Newark, USA)
Jon Cowans is a professor in the History department at Rutgers University-Newark. His research areas are focused on 20th century Europe, politics, culture, and communications, as well as the history of France, and teaches courses related film, history, capitalism, socialism and colonialism.

He completed his PhD in modern European history at Stanford University in 1994, and has published extensively on the subject matter in relation to cinema. This includes Empire Films and the Crisis of Colonialism, 1946-1959 by John Hopkins University in 2015. His most recent book is Film and Colonialism in the Sixties: The Anti-Colonialist Turn in the US, Britain and France, published by Routledge in 2019.

Image Credit: Jon Cowans

Kate Imy (University of North Texas, USA)
Kate Imy is a historian of war and empire teaching classes on questions of identity (race, gender, class, religion) in the twentieth-century British imperial world. She completed her PhD at Rutgers University, with a dissertation entitled Spiritual Soldiers and the Politics of Difference in the British Indian Army, 1900-1940.

She has conducted research and presented in India, Nepal, the United Kingdom, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. Her first book, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army, was released by Stanford University Press in 2019, winning the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Book Award. Her second book is entitled Hearts and Minds: War, Empire, and Military Culture in Singapore and Malaya.

Image Credit: Kate Imy

Nadine Chan (Claremont Graduate University, USA)
Nadine Chan is Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Claremont Graduate University. Her areas of research include media historiography and theory, postcolonial and new empire studies, environmental media, and Southeast Asian film and media.

Chan’s first book-in-progress, Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial Worldmaking in an Unruly Medium, conceptualizes film as an extractive and worldmaking medium in the context of colonial British Malaya. Chan’s second research project investigates complexity theory in visual and data-driven representations of environmental degradation and species loss.

She has published in Journal of Environmental Media, Cinema Journal, Studies in Documentary Film, Periscope for Social Text, and the anthologies Theorizing Colonial Cinema (forthcoming) and Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film.

Image Credit: Nadine Chan

Panel 2 Panelists

Lawrence Napper (King's College London, UK)
Lawrence Napper is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at King’s College London, United Kingdom. His interests include Silent Cinema, British Cinema, Cinema and War, The Hollywood Musical and the representation of London on film.

He gained his PhD at the University of East Anglia in 2001, and is also a graduate of UEA’s Film Studies with an Archiving MA. He was senior researcher on UEA’s British Cinema History Research Project from 2001-2005, and taught on the MA and BA courses at UEA.

Lawrence is currently working on a project which seeks to decolonise British film history teaching, and highlight the history of British cinema as an imperial (rather than a national) formation. He has previously published books British Cinema and Middlebrow culture in the interwar years (2009), The Great war in Popular British Cinema of the 1920s (2015) and Silent Cinema: Before the Pictures Got Small (2017).

Image Credit: Lawrence Napper

Anne Wetherilt (Open University, UK)
Anne Wetherilt is a PhD candidate in the Department of English at The Open University, United Kingdom. Her thesis – provisionally entitled ‘Decolonisation and the Female Middlebrow Novel’ – examines the work of women writers, who witnessed the end of British rule in India, Malaya and East Africa.

She also holds a PhD in economics and have worked for many years in public policy. Her broader interests span postcolonial and global literatures, Cold War fiction and middlebrow culture more generally.

She recently published “Emergency politics and the middlebrow novel: A comparative analysis of Han Suyin’s ... and the Rain my Drink and Mary McMinnies’s The Flying Fox” in Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Image Credit: Anne Wetherilt

Jeremy E. Taylor (University of Nottingham, UK)
Jeremy E. Taylor is a cultural historian of east and southeast Asia. He is an associate professor of modern Asian history at the University of Nottingham (UK) and director of the European Research Council-funded ‘Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia’ (COTCA) Project.

He is the author or editor of four books including, most recently (with Lanjun Xu) Chineseness and the Cold War: Contested Cultures and Diaspora in Southeast Asia and Hong Kong (Routledge 2021). His work has also been published in around 30 different academic journals including, most recently, the Journal of Asian Studies and the European Journal of East Asian Studies.

Image Credit: Jeremy E. Taylor

Panel 3 Panelists

Kevin M. Flanagan (George Mason University, USA)
Kevin M. Flanagan is an assistant professor British film, television cultural and adaptation studies at the College of Humanities and Social Sciences in George Mason University.

He received his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2015 in English/film studies, with a dissertation entitled The British War Film, 1939-1980: Culture, History, and, Genre. A book based on this project, called War Representation in British Cinema and Television: From Suez to Thatcher, and Beyond, was published in October 2019 by Palgrave. He is the editor of Ken Russell: Re-Viewing England's Last Mannerist (2009, Scarecrow Press) and contributed the "Videogame Adaptation" chapter to Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies (2017, ed. Thomas Leitch).

He is currently working on books relating to biographical sketches of outside, eccentric, and polymath figures in Post-War British cultural life, as well as the uncanny spaces and landscapes in post-war British cinema and television.

Image Credit: Kevin M. Flanagan

Chrishandra Sebastiampillai (Monash University, Malaysia)
Chrishandra Sebastiampillai is Lecturer in Film, Television and Screen Studies at Monash University Malaysia. Her research interests include film stardom and celebrity, representations of race and identity in cinema, Philippine cinema and Southeast Asian cinema.

She completed her PhD in Film and Television at Monash University, exploring a nationally specific form of stardom in Philippine cinema - the ‘love team’, or the film couple in the early 1970s, a period that coincided with the early stages of Martial Law. This builds on her earlier Honours dissertation, which examined a contemporary love team in popular Philippine cinema. Currently, she is working on a research project that investigates representations of Malaysian heritage houses on screen and film-induced tourism.

She teaches Southeast Asian cinema at Monash, a unit that focuses on the established and emerging cinemas in the region in addition to an introductory course to the major.

Image Credit: Chrishandra Sebastiampillai

Panel 4 Panelists

Chew Hui Yan (Kagawa University, Japan)
Chew Hui Yan is an Adjunct Instructor at the International Office of Kagawa University in Japan. Her research interests include Malaysian cinema, Sinophone studies, diasporic filmmaking, and identity politics.

She attained her her PhD from the Graduate School of Humanities, Nagoya University Japan, analysing 21st century Sinophone Malaysian films in relation to Malaysia’s socio-historical and political contexts. This is done using Sinophone studies as the theoretical framework, and in conjunction with diaspora studies, accented cinema and metropolitanism.

Her publications include “A Study on Inter-ethnic Relations through Yasmin Ahmad’s Films” and “Making Inroads into a Taboo Subject: Film Production by Malaysian Chinese” in Malaysian Journal of Chinese Studies.

Image Credit: Chew Hui Yan

Eugene Chua (PhD graduate, Monash University, Malaysia)
Eugene Kee Hong Chua is a recent doctoral graduate from Monash University Malaysia. His dissertation charts how the split between Malaysia and Singapore in 1965 is central not only to the ideological conceptions of the two nations, but also to their respective literatures which contest and grapple with those political imaginations. He is working on converting that research into a book manuscript.

While his primary research focuses on Malaysian and Singaporean cultural texts, he retains an active interest in postcolonial and contemporary literature – both of which he has previously taught. He has also written on Thomas Pynchon and postmodernism for his master’s thesis.

Image Credit: Eugene Chua

Sim Chi Yin (King's College London, UK)
Sim Chi Yin is an artist from Singapore whose research-based practice includes photography, moving image, archival interventions and text-based performance, and focuses on history, conflict, memory and extraction. She is currently based in Berlin.

Recent solo exhibitions include One Day We’ll Understand, Zilberman Gallery Berlin (2021); One Day We’ll Understand, Les Rencontres d’Arles (2021); One Day We’ll Understand, Landskrona Foto Festival, Sweden (2020); One Day We’ll Understand, Hanart TZ Gallery, Hong Kong (2019); Most People Were Silent, Institute of Contemporary Arts, LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore (2018); and Fallout, Nobel Peace Museum, Oslo (2017). Her work has also been included in group shows such as Most People Were Silent, Aesthetica Art Prize, York Art Gallery, United Kingdom (2019); UnAuthorised Medium, Framer Framed, Amsterdam, The Netherlands and Relics, Jendela (Visual Arts Space) Gallery, Esplanade, Singapore (both 2018); and at the Guangzhou Image Triennial (2021) and the 15th Istanbul Biennial, Turkey (2017). Sim was commissioned as the Nobel Peace Prize photographer in 2017, nominated for the Vera List Center’s Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice 2020.

Chi Yin is represented by Zilberman Gallery in Berlin and Hanart TZ Gallery in Hong Kong. She is also doing a visual practice-based PhD at King’s College London.

Image Credit: Joel Low