Vanessa Frangville

Vanessa Frangville is the coordinator of this project. A professor in China Studies at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) since 2014, she is also the director of EASt (ULB center for East Asian Studies) and co-director of Routledge’s “Contemporary Asian Societies” series.

Her previous research dealt with discourses on ethnicity and nation building in modern and contemporary China, with a special focus on cinema and “ethnic minority” film. She has published several articles and book chapters on cinema about China’s “minority” or “non-Han” ethnic groups and on China’s Tibetan cinema. 

As the main coordinator of the GENEsYs funded collective research project (2016-2022), she also published two edited volumes and one special issue on youth and public spaces in East Asia.

More recently, she also contributed to research on academic freedom challenges and prospects through one edited volume and several articles and book chapters focusing on academic freedom in China and China Studies.

Currently, her research interests include cultural and artistic expressions of self and collective belonging in the Uyghur diaspora in Europe and North America since 2016; artistic and scientific migration from the Uyghur region after the 1980s; and Uyghur literature and cinema from the 1990s to today. In 2022, she published the first anthology of Uyghur literature translated into French (with Mukaddas Mijit). She also edited three special issues on the Uyghur situation in 2020 and 2021.

In addition, since January 2023, she is the main coordinator for ULB in a Horizon-Widera project entitled REMOTE XUAR (Remote Ethnography of Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Methodology and Research Capacity Building) with the Palacky University Olomouc (PI) and the University of Würzburg.