Associate Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies, UCSB

Santa Barbara, California

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Michael Berry is associate professor of contemporary Chinese cultural studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University in 2004. His research interests include modern Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, cultural studies, and translation. He is the author of Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia, 2005; Rye Field, 2007; Guangxi Normal University Press, 2008), A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia, 2008) and Jia Zhangke’s Hometown Trilogy (British Film Institute and Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He is also the translator of several novels, including The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (with Susan Chan Egan) (Columbia, 2008), To Live (Anchor, 2004), Nanjing 1937: A Love Story (Columbia, 2002, Anchor, 2004, Faber & Faber, 2004), and Wild Kids: Two Novels about Growing Up (Columbia, 2000).

Future projects include a two volume collection of essays and dialogues on the Modernist literary movement in Taiwan entitled Modernism Revisited (forthcoming, Rye Field, Taiwan), Divided Lenses, an collection of articles (co-edited with Chiho Sawada) on Screen Representations of War in East Asia, 1931-1951, a book-length record of interviews with film director Hou Hsiao-hsien, and a monograph on how the US has been imagined in the popular imagination of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from 1949 to the present, tentatively titled “China’s Americas: Imagining the U.S. through Chinese Literature, Film and Popular Culture.” Current translation projects include the modern martial arts novel The Swallow (Xiayin) by Zhang Beihai and Wu He’s award-winning exploration of the 1930 Musha Incident, Remains of Life (Yu sheng), which has been honored with a 2008 NEH Translation Grant.

Works by Michael Berry

The Song of Everlasting Sorrow (co-translated with Susan Chan Egan), published by Columbia University Press in January, 2008

To Live, published by Anchor in August, 2003