Weixian Pan

Weixian Pan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Film and Media at Queen’s University. She holds a PhD in Film and Moving Image Studies from Concordia University, Montreal. Before joining Queen’s University, she was Assistant Professor of Interactive Media Arts at NYU Shanghai and affiliated faculty at the Center for Global Asia. She also taught at the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema and was the coordinator and researcher in the Global Emergent Media Lab.

Her research interests center on the politics of visuality (including cinema, television, video, and other new media/art forms), critical media infrastructure, and environmental media. She examines media’s textual, material, and socio-political dynamics mainly through China's situated experience but gradually expands to explore the trans-regional linkages across Asia. Her current book project, Frontier Vision: The Geopolitics of Seeing China’s Borderlands, examines how China’s geopolitical aspirations have been hyper-mediated and entangled with the logic of frontier-making between the mid-twentieth century and the present. This book offers a transhistorical view of the visual regimes that recalibrate natural environments and their political promises through geological extraction, televisual mediation of hydropower, and maritime signal sovereignty. Her book project was also supported by the Luce/ACLS Early Career Fellowships in China Studies (2024-2025) from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Her work appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as Television and New Media, Culture Machine, Asiascape: Digital Asia, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, and Journal of Environmental Media. In the past, she has led curatorial projects such as “Elemental Relations: Thinking Ecologically through Artist Film and Video” (2021) and “China Now: Independent Visions” (2016). She also co-organizes the “Strata of the Asia Pacific: Mediating the Geologic and Aquatic Environment” online workshop that fosters interdisciplinary conversations across scholars and artists.

She is currently working on a collaborative video project on the hydraulic and infrastructural landscapes along the Pearl River in southern China. Her next research aims to theorize Asia's transboundary linkages through different forms of aquatic mediation, such as the vernacular imagination of water, the history of underwater technology, and the emerging blue carbon economy.

Selected Publications:

• Special journal issue “Energy and Media,” co-edit with Yandong Li (University of Washington). Journal of Chinese Cinema, forthcoming Summer/Fall 2025.
• “Crash Landing on the Philippines: Transnational Korean Dramas and Internet Infrastructure Desires.” Television and New Media, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1177/15274764241242403
• “Teaching with Video: A Global Media Form and Interfaces of Global Encounters,” Teaching Dossier on Teaching the Global in Media Studies. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (Winter 2022)
• “Bitcoin’s Ethnic Shadow and Echoes.” Art Review of Bitcoin Mining and Field Recordings of Ethnic Minorities, by Liu Chuang. Journal for Environmental Media 2, no. 2, 2021.
• “Island Fever: Videated Populism and Disputed Geographies at Sea.” Culture Machine 19, 2020. (Special issue on “Media Populism”)
• “Under the Dome: Un-engineering Digital Capture in China’s Smog.” In Asiascape: Digital Asia 4, no. 1-2, 2017.