Qinna Shen

Qinna Shen received her Ph.D. in German from Yale University and is Associate Professor and Chair of German at Bryn Mawr College. Her research focuses on 20^th-century German culture, visual studies, and Asian German studies. She is the author of The Politics of Magic: DEFA Fairy-Tale Films (Wayne State UP, 2015) and Jiny Lan and the Art of Subversion: Chinese-German Culture and Politics through a Feminist Lens (Camden House, 2025, Open Access). She also co-edited two volumes Beyond Alterity: German Encounters with Modern East Asia (Berghahn Books, 2014) and Charting Asian German Film History: Imagination, Collaboration, and Diasporic Representation (Camden House, 2025, in the series Screen Culture: German Film and the Visual). Her articles have appeared in numerous peer-reviewed journals, including The German Studies Review, Seminar, Transit, The Brecht Yearbook, Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS), Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Marvels & Tales, and The Mathematical Intelligencer, as well as in a number of edited volumes. She is currently working on a book project entitled “Film and Cold War Diplomacy: China and the Two Germanys, 1949–1989,” under contract with Routledge. Her cross-disciplinary article “A Refugee Scholar from Nazi Germany: Emmy Noether and Bryn Mawr College” reached the circles of mathematicians and physicists and helped revive the memory of the greatest woman mathematician of the twentieth century.

Before joining the Bryn Mawr faculty in 2016, she held Visiting Assistant Professor positions at Miami University in Ohio and at Loyola University Maryland. At Bryn Mawr, she teaches all levels of German language, literature, and culture courses. She consistently teaches new topical courses, including “Weimar Cinema (1918–1933),” “Ethics of Innovation in a German Context,” “Representing Diversity in German and Austrian Cinema,” “Funny Germans: Humor and Satire from the Enlightenment to the Present,” “Berlin in German Literature and Film,” “Crime, Justice and the Courtroom,” “1968 and Its Legacies,” “German Encounters with East Asia,” and “Censorship in Germany and China.” 

In terms of service for the profession, in 2017–2020 she served on the German Studies Association (GSA) Program Committee (20^th/21^st Germanistik). In 2021, she chaired the DAAD/GSA Article Prize Committee. She also chaired the GSA Seminar Committee for the 2023 and 2024 conferences. She has been elected to the German Studies Association Executive Board and will start her three-year term on January 1, 2026. She is on the editorial boards of German Studies Review, Visual Culture in German Contexts Series, and German Screen Studies. Together with Qingyang Freya Zhou and Zach Ramon Fitzpatrick, she compiled “Asian German Filmography: A Teaching Guide.” As a member of CineGraph Babelsberg in Germany, she regularly contributes to their journal Filmblatt and their film series. She is currently co-editing the special issue marking the GSA’s 50^th anniversary in 2026.