Evelyn Shih

Biography:
Evelyn Shih received a BA with honors in Literature from Yale University, as well as an MA in Asian Studies and a PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from UC Berkeley. Her PhD dissertation, The Cold War Comic: Power and Laughter in Taiwan and South Korea, 1948-1979, compares the intermedial phenomenon of comic culture in two US-allied countries in Asia during the Cold War. She writes about various media, from comic strips and mass periodicals to film and literature, as a part of a comic sensorium and an emerging mode of mass communication in the mid-20th century. She is currently at work on a book manuscript of the same name, as well as a project on the topolect cinema of Taiwan, the Taiyupian; and another project on colonial travelers of Taiwan and Korea, who capture their experience within and without of Japanese empire on the Chinese continent.

Publications:

• “Two Fools: The Vernacularization of Laurel and Hardy in Chinese Cinemas,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2018).
• “Doubled Over 007: Aryu Bondŭ and the Genre Mixing Comedy in Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies v. 22 no. 2 (2017).
• “ ‘Chuan’ and the Last Laugh: Opera Legacy, Comedy and Camp as Attraction in the Late Years of Taiyupian”「串」出最後一笑：晚期台語片的戲曲傳承，喜劇與敢曝的魅力, in Bai bian qian huan bu si yi: Taiyupian de hun xue yu zhuan hua [Myriad mysterious manifestations: Taiyupian’s hybridity and transformation]. Taipei, Taiwan: Lian Jing Publishing (2017).
• "Nearing Nanjing, 1938: The Beautiful, the Empty, and the Dead,” Room One Thousand Issue 3 (2015): 388-417.
• "Getting the Last Laugh: Opera Legacy, Comedy and Camp as Attraction in the Late Years of Taiyupian," Journal of Chinese Cinemasv. 7 iii (2013): 241-262.

Research Interests:
Modern Chinese literatures, minor literatures and topolect, film and media, affect theory, visual culture and theory, Cold War studies, postcolonial studies, comparative studies, genre, language philosophy, modern Korean literature and culture, Japanese literature and culture