Ling Zhang

Ling Zhang is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at State University of New York, Purchase College and a research fellow at IIAS Leiden University for 2024-2025. She is completing two monographs: “Unruly Sounds: Chinese Cinema and Transnational Acoustic Culture, 1929-1949” and “Sounding Wayward Journeys: Traveling Film and Media in China and the World, 1949-1989,” and co-edited Socializing Medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media (Hong Kong University Press, 2025). Her research on film sound, Chinese-language cinema, digital media, and the cultural Cold War has appeared in Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Film Quarterly, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, among others.

Recent publications:

P., Yan, Y., & Zhang, L. (2025). Socializing medicine: Health Humanities and East Asian Media. Hong Kong University Press.

Zhang, L. (2025). A scratch embellishing an empty face: ‘Shamate’ subculture and Chinese migrant workers in We Were Smart (2019). The South Atlantic Quarterly. (Forthcoming, October).

Zhang, L. (2025). Dressing the wounds: Medical internationalism and embodied realism in Dr. Bethune (1965). Canadian Journal of Film Studies. (Forthcoming).

Zhang, L. (2022). Sound shimmers, luminosity in the darkness: Ear-witnessing Cold War paranoia in Edward Yang’s A Brighter Summer Day (1991). JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, 61(4), 132-156.

Zhang, L. (2021). From ‘mystification’ to ‘massification’: Canton counterespionage films and Cold War geopolitics. The Journal of Popular Culture, 54(6), 1309-1330.