Prof. TENG Shao-Hung Tim

Tim Shao-Hung Teng is Assistant Professor of Chinese and Sinophone film and media at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He works across the fields of environmental humanities, media studies, critical theory, and STS. His book project, titled Earthbound Mediation: Geological Entanglements in Sinophone Extractive Zones, studies four historical sites of earth material extraction and their entanglement with media technology across China and Taiwan throughout the twentieth century. The first of its kind to feature extractive practices in Sinophone media culture, the project calls for a rethinking of the extractive zone as mediated by a wide array of geotechnical relations, whose world-making ability deserves careful attention alongside critiques of resource exploitation. He has also begun work on a second book about limestone and mudstone, whose metamorphoses as karst, coral, and cement he traces across various sites from geology to the ocean, from literature to contemporary art.

Teng’s peer-reviewed work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Public Culture, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, positions: asia critique, Screen, New Review of Film and Television Studies, Journal of Chinese Cinemas, and Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies. He has also contributed to the edited volumes Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion and The Aesthetics of Geopower: Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies. He is the co-editor of a forthcoming Chinese-language volume titled Film Studies in Taiwan: Cross-Generational Dialogues. Outside of academia, he works as a film curator. His curatorial experiences include internship in the Department of Film at MoMA in NYC as well as collaboration with Harvard Film Archive on East Asian film programs.

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Environmental humanities / Media theory / Media and geology / Chinese-language cinema and visual culture

Edited Volume in Progress

• Tim Shao-Hung Teng and Carol Chih-Ju Lin, eds. Dianying yanjiu zai Taiwan: Kuashidai duihua [Film Studies in Taiwan: Cross-Generational Dialogues]. Taipei: Showwe, forthcoming in 2025.

Refereed Journal Articles

• “Prospecting a Socialist Oil Field: Extraction as Geotechnical Mediation,” forthcoming in Public Culture.
• “Volumetric Mediation of the Subterranean Mine: Geologic Intimacy in a Taiwan Coal Village,” forthcoming in Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. [OnlineFirst version]
• “Archaeology of the Eyeball: Lu Xun, Eye-Gouging Myth, and Ocular Anatomy.” positions: asia critique 31, no. 3 (2023): 541–70. [Chinese translation: “Yanqiu de kaogu: Lu Xun, wayan chuanshuo yu yanqiu jiepou,” trans. Chen Yixuan, Wenzhi chunqiu, forthcoming.]
• “The Motorcycle Diaries of a Topolect Cinema.” Screen 64, no. 1 (2023): 1–21.
• “Time, Disaster, New Media: Your Name as a Mind-Game Film.” New Review of Film and Television Studies 20, no. 4 (2022): 459–88.
• “Murderous Shadows, Terrifying Air: Dr. Caligari in China.” Journal of Chinese Cinemas 14, no. 3 (2020): 223–41.
• “Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing? Reinventing Intermedial Urban Space in Early 1980s Taiwan.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 43, no. 2 (2017): 57–86.
• “Zheci ta kaishi lüxing le: Hou Xiaoxien Kafei shiguang de yinxing zhuanxiang” [This Time He Travels: Café Lumière and Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Feminine Turn]. Cross-Cultural Studies 2, no. 1 (2015): 135–60.

Refereed Book Chapters

• “From Molds to Energy Vessels: Reinventing the Socialist Subject in the Extractive Zone.” In The Aesthetics of Geopower: Imagining Planetary Histories and Hegemonies, eds. Simon Ferdinand and Colin Sterling, under consideration with publisher.
• “Taiyupian motuoche riji: Weixian de qingchun de tuopu yu dizhi” [The Motorcycle Diaries of Taiwanese-Language Cinema: Topology and Topography in Dangerous Youth]. In Dianying yanjiu zai Taiwan: Kuashidai duihua, eds. Tim Shao-Hung Teng and Carol Chih-Ju Lin. Taipei: Showwe, forthcoming in 2025.
• “Psychic Grannies: Animation and Animism in Turn-of-the-century Taiwan.” In Chinese Animation: Multiplicities in Motion, eds. Daisy Yan Du, John Crespi, and Yiman Wang. Cambridge: Harvard University Asia Center, 2024. 127–53.

Selected Essays, Book Reviews, Program Notes

• Review of Deepwater Alchemy: Extractive Mediation and the Taming of the Seafloor by Lisa Yin Han, forthcoming in Media+Environment.
• “Lianai yu yiwu: Cong dangdai xiufu kan zaoqi dianying de xingbie, laodong he qihou” [Love and Duty: Rumors and Tears on Screen, Labor and Climate in the Studio]. Fa: Film Appreciation Journal 197 (December 2023): 92–101.
• “The Politics and Pedagogy of East Asian Cinema at an American University.” New Review of Film and Television Studies blog, August 2022.
• “Tabooed Initiation: Two Early Films by Mou Tun-fei.” Program Notes for the Harvard Film Archive, January 2022. Coauthored with Shaowen Zhang.
• Review of Information Fantasies: Precarious Mediation in Postsocialist China by Xiao Liu. Critical Inquiry 47, no. 4 (2021): 799–801.
• “Cities of Love and Sadness: Rediscovering Taiwanese-language Cinema of the 1960s.” Program Notes for the Harvard Film Archive, March and April 2021. Coauthored with Shaowen Zhang
• “Cong dangguo dao kuaguo: Wuganyuan de dianyingshi du hou.” Review of Wuganyuan de dianyingshi: Cengjing, Taiwan youge Haolaiwu [Once upon a Time in Hollywood Taiwan] by Chih-heng Su. Funscreen 672 (July 2020).
• “Documenting Taiwanese Modernism: Le Moulin’s Untimely Historical Project.” Taiwan Insight, September 2019.