Biography
Nadine Chan’s research investigates environmental media and infrastructures of power in colonial and postcolonial Southeast Asia. Her book manuscript-in-progress is titled A Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial Worldmaking in an Unruly Medium. Through various hermeneutics of tropicality and environ-mentality (such as infrastructure, logistics, extractivism, topography, and more) this research interrogates how colonial cinema manufactures ambient political space in British Malaya. Chan’s second research project, titled Humid Media: Thermodynamic Architectures of Calibration and Control, investigates humidity, thermal modernity, and ambient governmentality in Southeast Asia.
Chan has published in Cinema Journal, Journal of Environmental Media, Periscope for Social Text, Studies in Documentary Film, the Asian American Writers' Workshop and the anthologies Theorizing Colonial Cinema and Screening Race in Nontheatrical Film. Her work has been supported by a Connaught New Researcher Grant, a Social Science Research Council IDRF fellowship, a Harper-Schmidt postdoctoral fellowship at UChicago, a Global Asia fellowship at Nanayang Technological University Singapore, and other research and teaching awards and grants. Her dissertation received a Society of Cinema and Media Studies award of distinction.
Chan currently teaches courses in media history and historiography, environmental media studies, and postcolonial and new empire studies. She is a 2023-2026 Experiential Learning Faculty Fellow.
Selected Work
Journal Articles and Book Chapters
“The Jungle is Neutral, but…..”: Rainforest Hermeneutics in the Military Training Film,” Asian American Writers Workshop, 2023.
“A Time-Lagged Medium: Colonial Documentary in British Malaya and the Asynchronous Reproducibility of Reality,” Theorizing Colonial Cinema, Nayoung Aimee Kwon, Baek Moon Im, Takushi Odagiri (eds.), Indiana University Press, 2022.
“Pandemic Temporalities: Distal Futurity and the Digital Capitalocene,” Journal of Environmental Media, 1.2, August 2020.
“Aestheticizing Asian American Assimilation in the Learning Corporation of America’s Many Americans Series (1970-1982)” in Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film, Marsha Gordon and Allyson Field (eds.), Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019.
“Global Asia: A Critical Aesthetics Always in Search of Alternative Globalities,” with Cheryl Naruse, Periscope feature on “Global Asia: Critical Aesthetics, Alternative Globalities,” for Social Text, May 2018.
“Making Ahmad ‘Problem Conscious’: Educational Cinema and the Rural Lecture Caravan in 1930s British Malaya,” Cinema Journal 55.4, July 2016.
“‘Remember the Empire, Filled with Your Cousins’: Poetic Exposition in the Documentaries of the Empire Marketing Board,” Studies in Documentary Film 7.2, June 2013: 105-118.
“Slumdog Millionaire and the Troubled Place of Cinema and Nation,” Spectator, vol. 30.2, Fall 2010: 37-45.
Editorial Work
“Global Asia: Critical Aesthetics, Alternative Globalities,” Nadine Chan and Cheryl Naruse (eds.), Periscope feature for Social Text, May 2018.
Other Writing
“Colonial Educational Cinema,” Oxford Bibliographies, 2019.