Cameron L. White

I study Chinese-language film, literature, and audio media, with a focus on multilingualism and its impact on how a sense of place is transmitted among people. My dissertation project centers around language communities in East Asia and North America, though I am broadly interested in theoretical issues related to translation, media circulation, and area studies. I explored some of these themes in my essay “Film Audiences as Context for Translation: Three Sketches of Chinese Cinema in the United States,” published in the edited volume Chinese Films Abroad: Distribution and Translation (Yves Gambier and Haina Jin eds., 2024). I have also researched how relationships between media and place can shift over time; my 2021 Film Quarterly article, “Pixels, Police and Batons: Hong Kong Cinema, Digital Media, the 2019 Protests, and Beyond,” examines the impact of online videos from the 2019 Hong Kong protests on the local cops-and-robbers genre. 

I am a proponent of making the learning of Sinitic languages more accessible, especially when it comes to less commonly taught varieties. I co-host the podcast Chatty Cantonese (粵語白白講) with Raymond Pai (University of British Columbia), which features interviews with students, teachers, and researchers of Cantonese, and through my website CantoBlog, I try to connect prospective learners of Cantonese with various study tools. I am also an enthusiastic translator of works from Standard Written Chinese, Mandarin, Cantonese, and/or Taiwanese into English, having worked on genres ranging from opera libretto to film subtitles to historical newspapers. 

Languages (other than English):

• Mandarin
• Cantonese
• Taiwanese Hokkien
• Korean
• Japanese
• German