Biography

Qingyang Freya Zhou is a PhD student in German with a Designated Emphasis in Film Studies. She joined the program in 2020 after receiving a BA in German Studies, Film and Media Studies, and Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Originally from Shenzhen, China, Freya is interested in the literary and cinematic interactions between Germany and East Asia, particularly as they pertain to socialist internationalism and migration studies.
Freya is currently the book review editorial assistant of the German Studies Review and the
managing editor of the website Multicultural Germany Project, Berkeley’s online forum that
fosters cross-disciplinary research on Germany’s changing cultural identity in the era of
globalization.

Selected Publications

Edited Volume
Charting Asian German Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic
Representation. Co-edited with Qinna Shen and Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick.
https://mgp.berkeley.edu/2021/08/31/cfp-asian-german-film-and-media/. Under contract
with Camden House.

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles
“‘A Temporality of Imminent, Never-Consummated Arrival’: Contemporary German
Documentaries on North Korea.” German Studies Review, vol. 46, no. 2, 2023, pp. 285-305,
https://doi.org/10.1353/gsr.2023.0042 (Winner of the GSA Prize for the Best Essay in
German Studies by a Graduate Student in 2022).

“Queering the Screen: Spectral Figures and German-Taiwanese Encounters in Monika Treut’s Ghosted.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies, vol. 58, no. 3, 2022, pp. 251-70,
https://doi.org/10.3138/seminar.58.3.2.

“Der Neo-Orientalismus in der DDR-Reiseliteratur der 1950er Jahre: Gerhard Kiesling und
Bernt von Kügelgens China (1957).” focus on German Studies, vol. 28, 2021, pp. 147-71,
https://doi.org/10.34314/FOGS2021.00008.

“Interactions Between the Chinese and the Jewish Refugees in Shanghai During World War II.” Penn History Review, vol. 25, no. 2, 2019, pp. 50-88,
https://repository.upenn.edu/phr/vol25/iss2/3/.

Book Chapters

“An Affect of Non-Belonging: Precarious Kinship and Conflicting Memories in Cho Sung-
hyung’s Korean-German Documentary Trilogy.” Forthcoming in Charting Asian-German
Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation, edited by Qinna
Shen, Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, and Qingyang Freya Zhou.

“A Façade of Solidarity: East Germany’s Attempted Dialogue with China in The Compass Rose
(Die Windrose, 1957).” East Asian-German Cinema: The Transnational Screen, 1919 to the
Present, edited by Joanne Miyang Cho, Routledge, 2021, pp. 123-45,
https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003157540-8.

Book Review
Review of Caroline Rupprecht’s Asian Fusion: New Encounters in the Asian-German Avant-Garde (Peter Lang, 2020). TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism
in the German-speaking World, vol. 13, no. 2, 2022, pp. 140-42,
https://doi.org/10.5070/T713258830.

Online Blogposts
“Asian-German Filmography: A Teaching Guide” (co-authored with Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick
and Qinna Shen). Multicultural Germany Project, 4 June 2021,
https://mgp.berkeley.edu/2021/06/04/asian-german-filmography/.

“Pandemic Palimpsest: Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan und der chinesische Engel” (co-authored
with Jezell Lee). Multicultural Germany Project, 30 April 2021,
https://mgp.berkeley.edu/2021/04/30/pandemic-palimpsest/.

“Archiving Memories in Pandemic Times: Documenting Jewish Exile in Shanghai.”
Multicultural Germany Project, 21 April 2021,
https://mgp.berkeley.edu/2021/04/21/documentaries-on-jewish-exile-in-shanghai/.

“‘Ich bin Diskursfeind’: Zafer Şenocak on Unreadable Archives.” Multicultural Germany
Project, 15 April 2021, https://mgp.berkeley.edu/2021/04/15/zafer-senocak-on-unreadable-
archives/.

“Against Categorization: On Inanimate Objects as Narrators in Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Adas
Raum.” Multicultural Germany Project, 18 March 2021,
https://mgp.berkeley.edu/2021/03/18/on-inanimate-objects-in-adas-raum/.

“Acts of Border Crossing in G.W. Pabst’s Comradeship (Kameradschaft, 1931).” Multicultural Germany Project, 24 October 2020, https://mgp.berkeley.edu/2020/10/24/border-crossing-
in-kameradschaft/.

Translations
“If Heritage Were Called Hither-Air” (translation of Marica Bodrožić’s poem “Wenn Die
Herkunft Herluft Hiesse”). DoubleSpeak, spring 2021, pp. 154-57,
https://www.doublespeakmagazine.org/poems_2021/if-heritage-were-called-hither-air.

“The Other Side of Things” (collaborative translation of Zafer Şenocak’s text “Die Rückseite der Dinge,” with Ardo Ali, Oliver Arter, Deniz Göktürk, Jezell Lee, and Elizabeth Sun).
TRANSIT: A Journal of Travel, Migration, and Multiculturalism in the German-speaking
World, vol. 13, no. 1, 2021, pp. 83-86, https://doi.org/10.5070/T713153429.