Cassandra Guan works on the history of animation with a special focus on the co-evolution of modernist aesthetics, new media technologies, and the life sciences. Her research underscores the material entanglements of political modernist cinema and the transnational permutations of a “bioanalytic” paradigm. Her first book project, provisionally titled Maladaptive Media: The Plasticity of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility, offers a new approach to the media theory of animation. In the book, Guan argues that intensification of animation aesthetics during the interwar period—taking place across film, radio, and print amidst the global proliferation of mass communication networks—revealed a crisis in the relations between the living being and its environment. Pursuing her interest in global animation histories, Guan is developing a second book project that explores the dialectic of mass mobilization and mass automation in Chinese state-sponsored media campaigns from the 1950s through the present, including episodes from China’s atomic energy program, panda diplomacy, South-South cooperation initiatives, and the two Beijing Olympics. Her ongoing research into Sinophone media histories decomposes the traditional area studies perspective, by tracing the genesis of an ethno-nationalist imaginary in a global environment shaped by the uneven flows of techno-scientific information and finance capital.

Guan received a PhD in modern culture and media from Brown University. Before joining CMS, she was the recipient of a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST), and she held a faculty position at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. A filmmaker as well as a scholar, Guan has been involved with several experimental and documentary film productions. Her latest film project Tender Comrades, an exploration of the ambiguities of gender and female friendship in left-wing cinemas of mainland China, received an Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds Award from the New York State Council on the Arts.