Nadine Chan

Nadine Chan is an Assistant Professor at Innis College, University of Toronto, specializing in environmental media and colonial/postcolonial studies. Her work focuses on Southeast Asia, particularly British Malaya, examining how cinema and infrastructures shape political spaces and ambient governance. She is on leave from May 2025 to February 2026.

Education: PhD in Cinema and Media Studies from the University of Southern California (USC), MA and BA in Media Studies from the National University of Singapore (NUS).

Research interests include tropicality, thermal modernity, and colonial cinema’s role in worldmaking. Key projects include A Cinema Under the Palms: Colonial Worldmaking in an Unruly Medium and Humid Media: Thermodynamic Architectures of Calibration and Control.

Publications span Cinema Journal, Journal of Environmental Media, and Studies in Documentary Film. Awards include the Connaught New Researcher Grant (2023), Social Science Research Council IDRF fellowship, and Society of Cinema and Media Studies’ dissertation award.

Teaching focuses on media historiography, environmental media, and postcolonial studies. She co-edited a Social Text feature on Global Asia and authored Colonial Educational Cinema for Oxford Bibliographies.

Grants include the Harper-Schmidt postdoctoral fellowship at UChicago and a Global Asia fellowship at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.