Ying Qian’s ‘Revolutionary Becomings’ Wins Honorable Mention for MLA East Asian Studies Book Award
Selection committee says EALAC professor’s study “breaks new ground in the field of contemporary media.”
The Modern Language Association (MLA) announced this week that Weatherhead East Asian Institute faculty member Ying Qian, Associate Professor of Chinese cinema and media in the Department of East Asian Languages and Cultures, has won Honorable Mention in its annual Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies for her 2024 book Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China.
The MLA nod is the third high-profile honor for Professor Qian’s book—a study of the prominent role played by documentary media in the political turmoil of modern China—within the past year.
The MLA awards the Scaglione Prize annually to “an outstanding scholarly work in East Asian or East Asian diaspora literary or linguistic studies.” The citation by this year’s selection committee reads, in part:
Combining finely crafted analysis with a bold theoretical perspective, Qian shows how the documentary impulse runs like a red thread through the political and cultural imagination of modern China. . . . Revolutionary Becomings breaks new ground in the field of contemporary media and imagines new paths of scholarly inquiry.
Published by Columbia University Press, Revolutionary Becomings is a title in the Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute series and is also cross-listed in the CUP series Investigating Visible Evidence: New Challenges for Documentary. The MLA recognition is the latest in a string of honors the book has earned since its publication in March of 2024: Last spring, it garnered the 50th Annual Lionel Trilling Book Award from the Academic Awards Committee of the Columbia College Student Council, and before that, it received the book award for the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC).
“I honestly couldn't have written this book without the Columbia community,” said Professor Qian. “I owe profound thanks to my brilliant and supportive colleagues and students, and to the strength of our Asian studies programs.”
The Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies will be presented publicly in Toronto on January 9, 2026, at the annual Modern Language Association convention.