Zeng Jinyan

Zeng Jinyan, writer, scholar, activist, and documentary filmmaker, is the 2017 Oak Fellow at Colby College. Zeng earned her PhD at the University of Hong Kong in 2017. Her PhD thesis is entitled The Genesis of Citizen Intelligentsia in Digital China: Ai Xiaoming’s Practices of Identity and Activism. Her "Visualizing Truth-Telling in Ai Xiaoming’s Documentary Activism” appared in Studies in Documentary Film in 2017.  Zeng’s 2016 book Feminism and Genesis of the Citizen Intelligentsia in China (Hong Kong: City University of Hong Kong Press) received a Publishing Award in the Social Science category of the 2017 Hong Kong Publishing Biennial Awards. Zeng co-directed the documentary film Prisoners in Freedom City with Hu Jia (2007), wrote the script for the animated short A Poem to Liu Xia (Trish McAdam, 2015), and produced the feature documentary film We The Workers (Wen Hai, 2017). Zeng’s creative work is a synthesis of her scholarship and her experience as an activist including eight years (2004-2012) of around-the-clock surveillance and periodic house arrest in China.