Ying Qian Wins Trilling Book Award for ‘Revolutionary Becomings’
Student Awards Committee hails her work as "an exemplar against which all other books we read had to measure up."
The Weatherhead East Asian Institute congratulates faculty member Ying Qian on winning the 50th Annual Lionel Trilling Book Award for her 2024 book Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China.
Ying Qian is Associate Professor of Chinese cinema and media in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures. Revolutionary Becomings traces the role documentary film played in the political turmoil of twentieth-century China—from the years preceding the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911, through the Republican era, and into the first decade post-Mao. Professor Qian discussed some of the book’s themes in an interview with Columbia News last summer:
"Cinema was among the 20th century’s most important forms of media, and documentary was particularly versatile and omnipresent. … Often produced and screened outside of film studios and theaters, documentary participated much more readily in political, industrial, military, and legal institutions and in social life than its fictional counterpart. Central to documentary’s mediating roles in revolutionary movements was its ability to build activist networks, transform political relationalities, and create new knowledge, all crucial for the directions and outcomes of revolutionary change."
Published by Columbia University Press, Revolutionary Becomings is a title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute series of monographs. It is also cross-listed in the book series Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary.
The Lionel Trilling Book Award was inaugurated in 1976 in honor of Lionel Trilling, the Columbia College graduate (’25) and later professor who was also a widely published critic and one of America’s most prominent public intellectuals. It is awarded every year to a member of the faculty whose book published in the previous year is seen as upholding Trilling’s distinguished legacy. Earlier Trilling Book Award winners in East Asian Studies have included William Theodore deBary (1983), Carol Gluck (1987), and David Lurie (2012).
Part of what makes the Trilling Book Award special is that it’s driven by students—in the form of the Academic Awards Committee of the Columbia College Student Council. Representing a cross section of classes and academic disciplines, the Committee works its way through all the nominated books over the course of the academic year before they finally settle on the title they consider most deserving of recognition.
Professor Qian accepted the Trilling Book Award in a stirring ceremony in the Low Library Faculty Room on May 14. The introductory remarks by Academic Awards Committee member Zackery Cooper (CC’25) are worth quoting at length:
“The members of the committee, in reading Revolutionary Becomings, could not have imagined a book that more perfectly engages with [the] long, twisting trail of documentary and revolutionary political history, providing a committee, most of whom knew next to nothing about this subject before reading, with a grounding that kept us thoroughly engaged every moment along the way. The case studies and breadth of material involved in developing her thesis demonstrated a dedication to research that became an exemplar against which all other books we read had to measure up.”
Speaking at the award ceremony, Professor Qian thanked students, colleagues, and Columbia’s resourceful libraries, and paid tribute to the ecology of learning on campus. “My book, all books published on this campus, and all the student papers and research reports, come from the same collaborative milieu where students and teachers research, read, write and learn together.”
The Trilling Award is the second prestigious honor Revolutionary Becomings has garnered this year. In April, it won the book award for the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). A judge on the AEJMC committee wrote that Professor Qian “expertly combines film history and the history of political propaganda to tell a new story of documentary in China during the twentieth century.”
Professor Qian will accept her AEJMC award in August, at the group’s annual national convention in San Francisco.
