Michael Berry is Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Previously, he was Professor of Contemporary Chinese Cultural Studies and Director of the East Asia Center at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He holds a Ph.D. from Columbia University and his areas of research include modern and contemporary Chinese literature, Chinese cinema, popular culture in modern China, and translation studies. He also holds affiliate appointments with Comparative Literature, Film and Media Studies, and Asian American Studies.
Berry is the author of A History of Pain: Trauma in Modern Chinese Literature and Film (Columbia University Press, 2008), which explores literary and cinematic representations of atrocity in twentieth century China; Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmakers (Columbia University Press, 2005), a collection of dialogues with contemporary Chinese filmmakers including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Zhang Yimou, Stanley Kwan, and Jia Zhangke; the monograph, Jia Zhang-ke’s Hometown Trilogy: Xiao Wu, Platform, Unknown Pleasures (British Film Institute, February 2009), which offers extended analysis of the films Xiao Wu, Platform, and Unknown Pleasures, and a forthcoming book-length collection of interviews with the award-winning film director Hou Hsiao-hsien. He is currently working on a monograph that explores the United States as it has been imagined through Chinese film, literature, and popular culture, 1949-present. He is also a contributor to numerous books and periodicals, including recent chapters in The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Cinemas (Oxford, 2013) and A Companion to Chinese Cinema (Blackwell, 2012).
