Faculty of Modern and听Medieval Languages and Linguistics Raised Faculty Building 海角社区 Sidgwick Avenue 海角社区 CB3 9DA United Kingdom
Dr Xin Peng is an Assistant Professor in Film and Screen Studies. She works primarily on early- to mid-20th century American film history, media technologies (especially telecommunications), and racialised labour. She鈥檚 published on talkies and early Asian American movie stars Anna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa; early Technicolor and Hollywood Orientalism; 1930s Busby Berkeley musical and racial capitalism; film historiography in relation to newsreel outtakes and lost silent film; and the 鈥渇irst鈥� Chinese film actress, Yan Shanshan. She is now writing a book-length media history of San Francisco鈥檚 Chinatown telephone exchange (c. 1894-1949) and its operators. An essay based on materials from this project, "'The Chinaman and His Phone': Noise, Gibberish, and the Telephone's Social Use," has won the Race and Histories of Technology Prize from the Society for the History of Technology (SHOT) in 2024.
Xin has served as the book reviews editor of Early Popular Visual Culture, managing editor for Feminist Media Histories, and assistant editor for the听Journal of Chinese Cinemas. She received her PhD from the University of Washington in Seattle, having previously studied for an MA at the University of Chicago and BA at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Selected published works听
鈥淥uttakes and Lost Film: The Fragmentary Encounter Between 鈥楴ewsreel鈥� Wong and the 鈥楥hinese Colleen Moore.鈥欌�� Journal of Cinema and Media Studies听63, no. 3 (Winter 2024): 170-176.
鈥淭hat Expensive Oriental Flesh: The Racial Form of a New Deal Musical.鈥� The Velvet Light Trap, no. 93 (Spring 2024): 40-51.
鈥淎nna May Wong and Sessue Hayakawa: Racial Performance, Ornamentalism, and Yellow Voices in Daughter of the Dragon听(1931).鈥� Camera Obscura 37, no. 2 (2022): 1-29.
鈥淐olour-as-Hue and Colour-as-Race: Early Technicolor, Ornamentalism and The Toll of the Sea听(1922).鈥� Screen听62, no.3 (Autumn 2021): 287-308.
鈥淵an Shanshan.鈥� In Jane Gaines, Radha Vatsal, and Monica Dall鈥橝sta, eds. Women Film Pioneers Project. New York, NY: Columbia University Libraries, 2020.
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