Dr. Qingyang Freya Zhou
Research Assistant Professor, Society of Fellows in the Humanities
Office: Run Run Shaw Heritage House, G.06
Email: freyaqz@hku.hk
PhD, University of California, Berkeley
BA, University of Pennsylvania
Qingyang Freya Zhou (she/her) is a Research Assistant Professor in the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at the University of Hong Kong. She received her PhD in German, with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies, from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2026. Her first monograph in progress, Divisive Kinship: The Long Cold War in Korean German Film and Literature, examines literary and cinematic representations of national division across East/West Germany and North/South Korea from 1900 to the present. Freya has published two award-winning journal articles on Asian diasporic cinema in Seminar and German Studies Review and co-edited the anthology Charting Asian German Film History (Camden House, 2025). For more of her writing, see qingyangfreyazhou.com.
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Asian German Studies
Korean Film and Literature
Cultural History of the Cold War
Migration and Diaspora Studies
Gender and Sexuality Studies
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Edited Volume
Charting Asian German Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation. Camden House, 2025. https://boydellandbrewer.com/book/charting-asian-german-film-history-9781640141780/?v=ae4171856a75.
Journal Articles
“‘A Temporality of Imminent, Never-Consummated Arrival’: Contemporary German Documentaries on North Korea.” German Studies Review 46, no. 2 (2023): 285–305. https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.0042.
“Queering the Screen: Spectral Figures and German-Taiwanese Encounters in Monika Treut’s Ghosted.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 58, no. 3 (2022): 251–70. https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.3.2.
Book Chapters
“Precarious Kinship, Conflicting Memories, and Ambivalent Affects of Belonging in Cho Sung-hyung’s Korean-German Documentaries.” In Charting Asian German Film History, 227–48. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781805436980-012.
“A Façade of Solidarity: East Germany’s Attempted Dialogue with China in The Compass Rose (Die Windrose, 1957).” In East Asian-German Cinema: The Transnational Screen, 1919 to the Present, ed. Joanne Miyang Cho, 123–45. Routledge, 2021. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003157540-8.
Book Review
Review of Jihoon Kim, Activism and Post-activism: Korean Documentary Cinema, 1981–2022. New York: Oxford University Press, 2024, 328 pp. Journal of Japanese and Korean Cinema 16, no. 2 (2024): 172–75. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17564905.2024.2395071.