Cassandra Guan

Cassandra Guan works on new approaches to questions of animation and knowledge in film and media studies. Her research underscores the material entanglements of twentieth-century media, capitalist economics, and the life sciences. Her first book project, Maladaptive Media: Plasticity in Animation, examines how interwar scientific studies of environmental adaptation transformed our experience of the moving image. In an astonishing array of motion picture experiments, from time-lapse animation of plants to film-based studies of chimpanzee and children, researchers from the US and Europe used media to study how organisms adapt—or fail to adapt—to their environments. These experimental practices and the intellectual controversies they provoked established the basis of a new knowledge economy in interwar culture and science, one organized around the “maladaptive plasticity” of the living being. Combining film analysis with the history of science, Guan investigates the flowering of animation aesthetics that coincided with the peak of developmental studies. By examining how media refashioned the organism’s relationship to the environment, the book offers a framework for understanding the mediation of agency and the complex relationship between biology and culture in the age of experimental science. 

Guan received a PhD in modern culture and media from Brown University. Before joining CMS, she held a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the MIT Center for Art, Science, and Technology (CAST) from 2022-2024 and taught in the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. A filmmaker as well as a scholar, Guan has participated in several experimental and documentary film productions. Her completed feature film project, The Filmballad of Mamadada (2013), received an Electronic Media and Film Finishing Funds Award from the New York State Council on the Arts and competed in official competition at CPH:DOX. Pursuing her interest in global animation histories, Guan is developing a second book project that explores the dialectic of mass mobilization and mass automation in Chinese state-sponsored media campaigns from the 1950s through the present.

• “Student Protest, Mediating Transference, and the Pedagogical Unconscious.” In Course Projections: Film Pedagogy, and Freedom, edited by Karen Redrobe and Kartik Nair, University of California Press, 2026.
• “Beijing Olympiad: First Time as Mass Spectacle, Second Time as Digital Ornament.” In Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media, edited by Carlos Rojas, Yomi Braester, and Jinying Li. Oxford University Press, 2026.
• “A Mode of Production Is Born: The Amphimixis of Eroticisms in Eisenstein’s Old and New.” Camera Obscura 121, vol. 41, n. 1(spring 2026), 1-51.
• “No Way Home: Primitive Accumulation in the Field of Vision.” South Atlantic Quarterly 124:4 (October 2025), 699-722.
• “Beyond the Utilitarian Principle: A Prehistory of Socialism.” Parapraxis 5 “Economies” (Spring 2025), 264-273.
• "When Does the Next Swan Depart?" World Picture 15 “Next” (Winter 2025), http://worldpicturejournal.com/article/when-does-the-next-swan-depart/
• “What Is the Work of Animation? The Plasticity of Time in the Fourth-Dimensional Image.” Film-Philosophy, vol. 28, no. 3 (2024): 477-503.
• “Rewriting the Ethnos Through the Everyday: Ulrike Ottinger’s China. Die Künste – der Alltag.” In Ulrike Ottinger: Film, Art and the Ethnographic Imagination, edited by Angela McRobbie, 101–119. Chicago: Intellect, The University of Chicago Press, 2024.
• “What Happens to the Index in Animation? The Case of The Taking of Tiger Mountain.” Association for Chinese Animation Studies (ACAS), https://acas.world/2024/05/05/what-happens-to-the-index-in-animation-the-case-of-the-taking-of-tiger-mountain/
• “Critique of Flowers: The Exigency of Life in the Era of Its Technical Reproducibility.” October 175 (Winter 2021): 20-63.
• “Cinema’s Natural Aesthetics: Environments and Perspectives in Contemporary Film Theory.” Co-authored with Adam O’Brien. Screen, vol. 61, no. 2 (Summer 2020): 272-279.

Autumn Quarter 2026

CMST 40000 Methods and Issues in Cinema Studies

CMST 67212 Psychoanalysis > Media Theory

Winter Quarter 2027

CMST 14555 Film and Experiment

Spring Quarter 2027

CMST 14400 Film and the Moving Image

Previously Taught Courses Include:

• CMST 25603 What is Animation?
• CMST 29202 Advanced Seminar: Materialisms and Methods
• CMST 29202 Advanced Seminar: The Lunar New Year Film
• SOSC 1905 China in East Asian Civilization – Beijing Through the Lens