Evelyn Shih

Evelyn Shih earned a BA in Literature from Yale University, as well as an MA in Asian Studies and a PhD in East Asian Languages and Cultures from UC Berkeley. Her book project, Cold War Laugh Lines: Comic Communication in Authoritarian Taiwan and South Korea, posits that comic culture became a crucial aspect of communication and oppositional affect at the height of Cold War tensions in East Asia. Drawing from a diverse archive that ranges from comic strips and mass periodicals to film, literature, and television, the book works to identify the transmedia emergence of comic form while foregrounding phenomenological experience, media history, and theories of communication. She is also at work on a second book project on the emergence of nonsense culture in colonial Taiwan and Korea, with smaller projects on film sound, music, and blue humanities on the horizon.

Currently, she serves as a co-chair of the Comedy and Humor Significant Interest Group (SIG) for the Society of Cinema and Media Studies. Her work has been published in the Journal of Chinese Cinemas, MCLC, and the Journal of Korean Studies, as well as various anthologies.  She is the co-editor of a forthcoming special issue of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas focusing on noise in Chinese media.

Publications:

• “Nonsense and sensibility: The importance of not being earnest in colonial Korea and Taiwan,” Routledge Companion to Korean Literature, ed. Heekyoung Cho, 212-225. Routledge, 2022.
• “No longer bond’s girl: Historical displacements of the top female spy in 1960s taiyupian,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas. June 2020.
• “Animation in the Sinosphere: A Review Essay,” MCLC book reviews. May 2020. URL: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/book-reviews/evelyn-shih/
• “Make Noise, Not War.” In Routledge Handbook of Modern Korean Literature, edited by Yoon Sun Yang, 292–306. Routledge, 2020.
• “Two Fools: The Vernacularization of Laurel and Hardy in Chinese Cinemas,” Journal of Chinese Cinemas (2018).
• “Doubled Over 007: Aryu Bondŭ and the Genre Mixing Comedy in Korea,” Journal of Korean Studies v. 22 no. 2 (2017).
• “ ‘Chuan’ and the Last Laugh: Opera Legacy, Comedy and Camp as Attraction in the Late Years of Taiyupian”「串」出最後一笑：晚期台語片的戲曲傳承，喜劇與敢曝的魅力, in Bai bian qian huan bu si yi: Taiyupian de hun xue yu zhuan hua [Myriad mysterious manifestations: Taiyupian’s hybridity and transformation]. Taipei, Taiwan: Lian Jing Publishing (2017).
• "Nearing Nanjing, 1938: The Beautiful, the Empty, and the Dead,” Room One Thousand Issue 3 (2015): 388-417.
• "Getting the Last Laugh: Opera Legacy, Comedy and Camp as Attraction in the Late Years of Taiyupian," Journal of Chinese Cinemas v. 7 iii (2013): 241-262.

Research Interests:

Modern Chinese literatures, minor literatures and topolect, film and media, affect theory, visual culture and theory, Cold War studies, postcolonial studies, comparative studies, genre, language philosophy, modern Korean literature and culture, Japanese literature and culture