Jason McGrath

he/him/his

jmcgrath@umn.edu

Asian & Middle Eastern Studies

225 Folwell Hall

9 Pleasant St SE
Minneapolis, MN 55455

Curriculum Vitae

Collegiate Affiliation

Asian & Middle Eastern Studies

Educational Background & Specialties

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Educational Background

PhD: East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, 2004 -
BA: Asian Studies/Chinese, University of Texas, 1993 -
M.A.: East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, 2001 -

Specialties

Modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture
Taiwan studies
Ecocritical theory and film studies
Chinese and international cinemas
Realism in fiction, film, and theory
Digital cinema, CGI, and animation
Chinese and Western Marxisms
Convention and intertextuality in film theory

Publications

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Publications

Chinese Film: Realism and Convention from the Silent Era to the Digital Age. University of Minnesota Press, McGrath, Jason, 2022.
McGrath, Jason. "The Independent Cinema of Jia Zhangke: From Postsocialist Realism to a Transnational Aesthetic." The Urban Generation: Chinese Cinema and Society at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2007): 81-114.
McGrath, Jason. Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age. Stanford University Press, 2008.
McGrath, Jason. "The New Formalism: Mainland Chinese Cinema at the Turn of the Century." China's Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the Twenty-first Century (2008): 207-221.
McGrath, Jason. "Metacinema for the Masses: Three Films by Feng Xiaogang." Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 17.2 (Fall 2005): 90-132.
McGrath, Jason. "The Urban Generation: Underground and Independent Films from the PRC." The Chinese Cinema Book (2011): 167-75.
McGrath, Jason. "The Cinema of Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam in Feature Film and Video." Displacement: The Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art (2008): 33-46.
McGrath, Jason. "Black Cannon Incident: Countering the Counter-espionage Fantasy." Chinese Films in Focus II (2008): 25-31.
McGrath, Jason. "Communists Have More Fun! The Dialectics of Fulfillment in Cinema of the People’s Republic of China." World Picture 3 (2009).
McGrath, Jason. "Cultural Revolution Model Opera Films and the Realist Tradition in Chinese Cinema." The Opera Quarterly 26 (2010): 343-76.
McGrath, Jason. "Acting Real: Cinema, Stage, and the Modernity of Performance in Chinese Silent Film." The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (2013): 401-420.
Maoist Laughter. Ping Zhu & Zhuoyi Wang, Hong Kong University Press, McGrath, Jason, 2019.
Apocalypse, or, the Logic of Late Anthropocene Ruins: McGrath, Jason, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review, no. 10, 2014.

Activities

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Activities

Research

Postsocialist Modernity: Chinese Cinema, Literature, and Criticism in the Market Age (completed): Book-length study of Chinese cinema and culture since the culture industry's transition to a market economy in the early 1990s. Original research funded by a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship..
Inscribing the Real: Realism and Convention in Chinese Fiction Film from the Silent Era to the Digital Age: An examination of various key moments and trends in Chinese cinema history, with a focus on the rhetorics of realism in filmmaking, film theory, and cultural criticism. Special attention paid to issues of convention and intertextuality, particularly as they interact with and often mitigate claims for realist representation..
Anthology of Chinese Film Theory and Criticism: Co-editing with Prof. Guo-Juin Hong (Duke U) an anthology of Chinese writings on film, covering the cinemas of Republican China, the PRC, Hong Kong, and Taiwan from eary film to the present..

Awards

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Awards

McKnight Land Grant Professorship, University of Minnesota, 2008 - 2010
Institute for Advanced Study Fellow, University of Minnesota, Spring 2007
Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, U.S. Department of Education, 2002 - 2003

Courses

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Courses

AMES 3336 - Revolution and Modernity in Chinese Literature and Culture
AMES 3337 - Contemporary Chinese Literature and Popular Culture
AMES 3356W - Chinese Film
AMES 5359 - Early Shanghai Film Culture
AMES 3920 Topics - End Times: Narrating Extinction and Apocalypse
AMES 5351 Chinese New Media
ALL 5356 - Gender and Sexuality in Chinese Film
ALL 5358 - Chinese Revolutionary Cinema
ALL 1906 - Early Film: Story and Spectacle
AMES 8001 - Critical Approaches to Asian Literary and Cultural Studies
MIMS 8001 - Theories of the Moving Image
HSEM 3014H - Classical Cinema as Global Vernacular