Dr. Shasha Liu
Title: Contract Instructor
Biography:
Dr. Shasha Liu is a historian of modern and contemporary East Asian media, visual, and popular cultures, with a focus on China. She received her Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto in 2024. Her research explores how image-making technologies reshape cultural identity, heritage, and transnational exchange across and beyond East Asia.
Her first book project, Mediating Dunhuang: Visual Reproduction and the Making of Modern Cultural Heritage, develops from her SSHRC-funded dissertation. It examines how the art of the Dunhuang Caves—an ancient Buddhist site along the Silk Road in northwestern China—was reimagined in the twentieth century through photography, mural copying, exhibition, animation, and film. Moving beyond premodern-centred Dunhuang studies, the project argues that modern technologies of reproduction transformed Dunhuang into a site of global cultural mediation and visual knowledge.
Her publications appear in Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion (Harvard University Press, 2025), the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and the Association for Chinese Animation Studies.
Courses:
- Chinese Cinema (EALC-2773)