Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries

Staff

Prof. Yiyang HOU

Assistant Professor, Associate Programme Director of MA in Creative and Media Industries

PhD. UCLA
MA. Columbia University
BA. State University of New York at Stony Brook

Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries
Lingnan University

Email: [email protected]
Location: HSH208

Assistant Professor, Associate Programme Director of MA in Creative and Media Industries
About Prof. Yiyang HOU

Yiyang Hou teaches courses on world film history, Sinophone digital culture, and East Asian creative industries at the Department of Digital Arts and Creative Industries, Lingnan University. He received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and an MA from Columbia University.

A media historian by training, Hou is broadly interested in all forms of modern and contemporary creative productions from the Sinophone world. His research on film and media studies has appeared in Journal of Chinese Cinemas, Global Media and China, Contemporary Animation, amongst others. He is the 2023 winner of the First Place Award for Student Writing from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS). Currently, he is working on his first book project, which is tentatively titled The Possessed Screen: Chinese Popular Cinema and the Reinvention of Moviegoing in Post-Mao China, 1978–1989. As the first monograph focusing exclusively on 1980s Chinese popular cinema and its unique, market-driven film culture, this book explores the cultural history of film exhibition and distribution in post-Mao China during the Early Reform Era.

Media infrastructures, world cinema history and screen practice, contemporary digital culture, urban China studies

Journal Articles

  • 2025. Yiyang Hou. ‘Going to the Video Hall: A Sensory Encounter with a New Urban Space in Post-Mao China.’ Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 64(2): 56–77.
  • 2024. Yiyang Hou. ‘Video-Going Inside the Movie Theater: Revisiting the Film Exhibition Crisis in Urban China During the Early Reform Era.’ Contemporary Cinema (Dangdai dianying) 3: 75–81.
  • 2022. Yiyang Hou. ‘Projecting the “Modern”: The Reconstruction of Urban Cinemas in Post-Mao China, 1987–1989.’ Journal of Chinese Cinemas 16(1): 74–91.
  • 2019. Yiyang Hou. ‘Rebranding Disney in the 21st Century: Bob Iger and the Global Anime Industry.’ Contemporary Animation (Dangdai donghua) 2(2): 45–51.

Book Chapters

  • 2025. Yiyang Hou. ‘History in Reform Era Popular Culture.’ In The SAGE Handbook of Interpreting Chinese History. London: Sage Publications. (Forthcoming)

Book Reviews

  • 2024. Yiyang Hou. Review of Cinematic Guerrillas: Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China, by Jie Li. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. The China Quarterly 259: 856–857.
  • 2023. Yiyang Hou. Dissertation review of Animating Space: Towards a Poetics of Chinese Animation, by Panpan Yang. University of Chicago, 2020. Association for Chinese Animation Studies, online.
  • 2021. Yiyang Hou. Review of Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China, by Xiao Liu. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019. Global Media and China 6: 508–510.

Translations

  • Forthcoming. Thomas Elsaesser. BFI Film Classics: Metropolis. Translated by Yiyang Hou. Beijing: Peking University Press.
  • Forthcoming. Peter Graham and Ginette Vincendeau, eds. The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. Translated by Yiyang Hou. Beijing: Peking University Press.
  • 2014. Laura Mulvey. BFI Film Classics: Citizen Kane. Translated by Yiyang Hou. Beijing: Peking University Press.
  • 2013. John Anderson. Edward Yang. Translated by Yiyang Hou. Shanghai: Fudan University Press.

Awards and Grants

  • The University Grants Committee (Hong Kong) – Early Career Scheme (ECS) with Award for Educational Activities, January 2025 – December 2027

  • Lingnan University – Faculty Research Grant (Pilot Study), 2023 – 2024

  • First Place Award for Student Writing, Society for Cinema and Media Studies, 2023

  • Department of Asian Languages and Cultures’ Teaching Assistant Award for Excellence in Teaching, UCLA, 2021

  • UCLA-NTNU Taiwan Studies Graduate Fieldwork Fellowship for research at National Taiwan Normal University, Summer 2019

  • University of California Humanities Research Institute (UCHRI) Grant – Multicampus Graduate Student Working Groups, 2018