ABOUT

Yiyang Hou is a PhD candidate in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at UCLA. He received his master’s degree in Film and Media Studies from Columbia University in 2017. Currently, Yiyang has completed his doctoral dissertation, and is actively pursuing his first book project on the cultural history of Chinese popular cinema during the early reform era (1978-1989).

A cultural historian by training, Yiyang is broadly interested in all forms of modern and contemporary cultural productions from the Sinophone world. He has contributed to such journals as Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Global Media and China, Fleurs des Lettres, and Contemporary Animation. In April 2023, Yiyang was awarded First Place Prize for Student Writing by the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) for his paper “Going to the Video Hall: A Sensory Encounter with a New Urban Space in Post-Mao China.”