Profile picture for Qian He

Contact Information

2031, FLB
707 S Mathews Ave Room 2090
Urbana, IL 61801
Assistant Professor

Biography

Belinda Qian He is an Assistant Professor of East Asian Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Hé's work lies at the intersection of film/media studies, art history, and legal humanities, exploring the role of film, photography, video, and emerging media in policing, punishing, and justice making. She pays specific attention to the history of East Asian and global cinema, exhibitions, and participatory media, associated with atrocity, witnessing, sexual violence and trauma. 

Her work has appeared in journals such as Grey Room, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, The China Review, Film Art, and edited volumes, including The Child in World Cinema (Lexington Books, 2018), Chinese Cinema: Identity, Power, and Globalization (HKU Press, 2022), Global Movie Magazine Networks (UC Press, 2024), and Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Humanities (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2025). Her in-progress book project Expose and Punish: Cinema and Trial by Screening in Times of Radical Reckoning has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) & Library of Congress, Asia Art Archive and the Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Greater China Research Programme, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation for International Scholarly Exchange, Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, and UMD's College of Arts and Humanities, among others.

She co-edited a special double issue (with Dr. Timmy Chen), "A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia," for the Journal of Chinese Cinemas and has collaborated on the Global Cinema collection of the Media History Digital Library at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She recently curated the screening series "Machines and Me: A Filmless Festival" as part of The Work of Self-Assembly in Global Asian Media and Art initiative, supported by the Arts for All program at the University of Maryland, College Park (UMD). Before joining the University of Illinois, Dr. Hé was an Assistant Professor jointly appointed in Cinema and Media Studies and East Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Maryland, College Park, with affiliations in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Artificial Intelligence Interdisciplinary Institute (AIM). She was previously a CCS Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Berkeley and has also taught global and Asian film and media at the University of Washington, Seattle and the University of Oklahoma.

Education

  • Ph.D., Department of Cinema and Media Studies, University of Washington Seattle

Additional Campus Affiliations

Assistant Professor, East Asian Languages and Cultures

academic interests

  • Global Cinema and Media
  • East Asian and Chinese film and screen media
  • Socialist media and cultural production
  • Legal Humanities
  • Media + Policing
  • Gender-based violence and sexual violence
  • Women's cinema, media practice, and archival practices
  • Critical AI Studies
  • Law and art; Performance Studies

Highlighted Publications

He, B. Q. (2025). Cine-News, Paper Cinema, and Film Periodicals as Intermedial Encounters. In E. Hoyt, & K. Conway (Eds.), Global Movie Magazine Networks (pp. 107-127). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520402775-009

He, B. Q. (2023). Socialist Multimedia Warfare: Cine-Exhibition of Class Struggle in 1960s China. Grey Room, 2023(89), 6-41. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00353

He, B. Q. (2021). Cinema at the table, cinema as roundtable. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 15(2-3), 176-199. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2021.2002606

He, B. Q., & Chen, T. C. T. (Eds.) (2021). A Deep Focus on Global Chinese Cinephilia. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 15(2-3).

He, B. Q. (2025). Trauma. In R. Spoo, & S. Stern (Eds.), Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature (pp. 467-470). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803925912.ch121

He, B. Q. (2017). Animating herstory? Stillness/motion, popular cinephilia and the economy of the instants in the post-cinema age. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 11(3), 243-258. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2017.1376554

Cao, L., Che, L., Chen, T. C. T., Chen, X., He, B. Q., Jiang, Z. M., Ma, R., Shen, H., & Zhao, J. (2021). A scholarly roundtable with Deep Focus and DIRECTUBE. Journal of Chinese Cinemas, 15(2-3), 257-279. https://doi.org/10.1080/17508061.2021.2002614

View all publications on Illinois Experts

Recent Publications

He, B. Q. (2025). Cine-News, Paper Cinema, and Film Periodicals as Intermedial Encounters. In E. Hoyt, & K. Conway (Eds.), Global Movie Magazine Networks (pp. 107-127). University of California Press. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520402775-009

He, B. Q. (2025). “(Legal) Trauma. In S. Stern, & R. Spoo (Eds.), The Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Humanities

He, B. Q. (2025). Trauma. In R. Spoo, & S. Stern (Eds.), Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature (pp. 467-470). Edward Elgar Publishing. https://doi.org/10.4337/9781803925912.ch121

He, B. Q. (2023). Genre, Community, and Self-Archive: Asian American Film and Video as ‘Cinema of Me’ since the 1970s. Contemporary Cinema (dangdai dianying), 323(2), 116–124.

He, B. Q. (2023). Socialist Multimedia Warfare: Cine-Exhibition of Class Struggle in 1960s China. Grey Room, 2023(89), 6-41. https://doi.org/10.1162/grey_a_00353

View all publications on Illinois Experts