Biography
Hsin-Yuan Peng is an environmental film and media theorist, specializing in transnational cinematic movements across East Asia, Europe, and North America. She is currently working on a book project, titled, Cinematic Meteorology: Aesthetics and Epistemology of Weather Images. It traces a transpacific history of meteorological filmmaking to reveal cinema’s centrality in meteorological research in Japan and the US. Recognizing meteorological image-making as knowledge production, the project argues that scientific understanding of the atmosphere is cinematically constructed. This construction accentuates weather’s concurrent importance as a metaphor and testing ground for cinematic possibilities. Drawing on media archaeology and visual analysis, it proposes an alternative genealogy of cinema from the perspective of atmospheric science and account for the sustained investment in observing and engineering weather in Japanese culture.
Her research has been supported by fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, The Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, and the Nippon Foundation.