Kinoshita Chika
木下千花

Chika Kinoshita is an associate professor of Film Studies in the Graduate School of Human and Environmental Studies at Kyoto University, Japan. Her research interests are in Japanese film history, film culture and gender and sexuality (particularly reproductive politics), and intermediality. She received her BA in Comparative Literature and MA in Culture and Representation from the University of Tokyo, Komaba, and a joint PhD in East Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Chicago in 2007. She was an assistant professor in the.Department of Film Studies at the University of Western Ontario, Canada. She had taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Michigan, Shizuoka University of Art and Culture, and Tokyo Metropolitan University before joining Kyoto in 2016. Her essays have appeared in numerous journals and collections in both English and Japanese. Her first book Mizoguchi Kenji ron: eiga no bigaku to seijigaku (Mizoguchi Kenji: Aesthetics and Politics of the Film Medium, Hosei University Press, 2016) received the Ministry of Education’s 67th Art Encouragement Award in the Criticism in the First Book category (Geijutsu Senshō Shinjinshō, Hyōron nado). At HYI, she is completing a book manuscript titled A History of the Pregnancy Film that sheds light on complex relationships between film and visual culture, the cinematic body, and reproductive politics in Japan.