Dr. Bliss Lim, currently Professor of Film and Media at the University of California, Irvine, will be joining the Cinema Studies Institute this autumn. Professor Lim is a specialist of Philippine cinema, cinematic temporality, queer temporality, film archives, postcoloniality and feminist film theory, and transnational Asian cinemas.
The work of Professor Lim is well-known to many in the film studies community through her award winning, field transforming book Translating Time: Cinema, The Fantastic, and Temporal Critique (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009; released in the Philippines by Ateno de Manila University Press, 2011), her 30 articles and chapters (including her classic essay on Daisies that appeared in Camera Obscura), four significant cultural policy publications and white papers related to film preservation, and three books of poetry. She is part of the editorial collective of Camera Obscura: A Journal of Feminism, Culture, and Media Studies (Duke University Press) and part of the editorial advisory boards for Bloomsbury’s Global East Asian Screen Cultures series, Pelikula: A Journal of Philippine Cinema, and Aracne Editrice Postcolonial Film and Media Studies series. She has held two Fulbright fellowships, been a visiting research fellow at Kyoto University, and won the Humanities Associates Faculty Teaching Award at the University of California, Irvine. Her forthcoming book The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press) is sure to do for theorizing media archives and their practices what Translating Time has done for temporal critique: open new and exciting pathways to thinking about and with moving image media and their cultures. She will be joining us as she commences her next book project Queer Traversals, which reflects on what queerness does to the globalization of Asian media industries. Her extensive scholarly achievements are complimented by considerable service to her department, university, and the field beyond, including work as a Diverse Educational Community and Doctoral Experience Faculty Mentor and Graduate Coordinator for her program.
In the 2022-23 academic year Professor Lim will be teaching CIN451H1S - Queer Asian Cinema and a graduate seminar, CIN3008HF: Topics in Film and Media History: Queer Girls and Racial Others.