Elizabeth Wijaya

Director, Southeast Asia Seminar Series
Assistant Professor, Department of Visual Studies
Assistant Professor, Cinema Studies Institute
Headshot of Elizabeth Wijaya

Biography

Main Bio

Elizabeth Wijaya works at the intersection of cinema, philosophy, and area studies. She is especially interested in the material and symbolic entanglements between East Asia and Southeast Asia cinema. Her work emphasizes a multimethodological approach, which is attentive to media forms, ethnographic detail, material realities, archival practices, international networks, and interdisciplinary modes of theorization. She received her PhD from the Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University, where she was affiliated with the East and Southeast Asian  Programs. For 2018–2019, she was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). She received the Connaught New Researcher Award in 2020. For 2020-2021, she is the convenor of “Mediating Race, Reimagining Geopolitics,” JHI-UTM Seminar. She is building an online-accessible collection of Asian short films with UTM library. She is also the co-founder of E&W Films. She is an Associate Producer of Taste (2021) directed by Lê Bảo, which received the Special Jury Award of the Encounters Competition at the 71st Berlinale Film Festival.

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