Meet Cynthia Dong, Visiting Duke English Professor

Professor Cynthia Dong joins Duke English for the 2025-26 academic year as a visiting professor. This fall she will be teaching English 390S – Film Comedy. She joins the department from McGill University. Senior Duke English major Trisha Santanam, ’26, recently interviewed Professor Dong. 

Trisha: Could you please introduce yourself and tell us a little about the academic topics that interest you?

Professor Dong: I’m a film historian coming to Duke University from McGill University in Canada, where I taught courses on film history and East Asian cinemas. Previously, I taught at the University of Chicago, where I taught international film history, including genres, movements, and filmmakers. I’m excited to join the Duke English community this fall.

In both my teaching and research, I focus on the global circulation of films and the cinematic experiments that emerge from cultural encounters and social change. I’ve been especially drawn to film genres, because they expand, travel, and transform. Genre studies can be formally rigorous and historically rich. They become even more rewarding – less predictable – when viewed through a transnational lens. 

• What gave a filmmaking trend its momentum?
• How did a genre gain popularity in different contexts of reception?
• How did filmmakers around the world adapt genre conventions to speak to their own social realities?
• How did film genres absorb and energize literary, theatrical, and other artistic traditions? 

These questions about genre often allow us to rethink established canons and uncover lesser-known works and hidden connections.

Trisha: What drew you to studying film? How did you come to focus on comedy in this medium?

Professor Dong: As long as I can remember, I have been drawn to films. Growing up, my family lived near a movie theater where my mother worked as a poster designer. That theater became my own “Cinema Paradiso.” I didn’t emerge from it to become a filmmaker like Giuseppe Tornatore – at least not yet – but I have always been fascinated by the experience of moviegoing itself. Day after day, I watched the same film with different crowds, and different films with the same community. I began to wonder about the magnetism of the movie theater and the many ways films hold our attention. I wanted to study the aesthetic experience of cinema: how it sharpens and shapes our perception of reality. Film history, to me, is a treasure trove of realized and unrealized possibilities of the cinematic art.

Comedies captivate me. They’re endlessly amusing, and the ways they amuse us are endlessly complex. I remember watching Chaplin’s City Lights and being struck by the precision of its craft. In what we would now call a “meet-cute” sequence, the Tramp, caught in traffic and dodging a cop, slips through a car as if it were a hallway. Closing the door behind him, he catches the attention of a flower girl, who mistakes him for a rich man. Flattered, he plays along and buys a flower. Here, every glance, every gesture, every reaction is so meticulously choreographed, framed, and edited together that we discover – first as viewers and then alongside the Tramp – that the girl is blind. Suddenly, we enter her world of sound. The punchline comes when a rich man steps into the car, shuts the door, and it drives away. The Tramp quietly retreats, and we hold our breath. This was Chaplin’s first partial sound film. By telling a story about sensory deprivation, he elicits our laughter and sympathy and heightens our awareness of both sight and sound. Not every film comedy is City Lights, of course, but a masterpiece shows us what the genre can do. At its best, comedy is profoundly perceptive and formally sophisticated – qualities that make studying it both challenging and deeply rewarding.

Trisha: This fall, you’re scheduled to teach “Film Comedy.” Could you tell us a little bit more about the course and its general structure?

Professor Dong: “Film Comedy” is one of my favorite courses to teach. It introduces the genre through a historical overview, moving chronologically from the earliest short comedies of the early 20th century to recent works from the 21st century. The history of film comedy is, by nature, a history of mixtures, variants, and parodies. Comedy encompasses a wide range of subgenres and often blends with others. In this course, we will study a wide range of international film comedies, tracing key developments, significant figures, and representative styles throughout the  genre history. A course on comedy’s place in film history is, in many ways, also a course on film’s place in comedy history. Compared to the grand traditions of theatrical comedy and humorous literature stretching back thousands of years, film comedy is a relatively young art form. How did it establish a distinct tradition in just over a century? We will see that some of the greatest comic talents embraced the medium from early on, and how the medium of film, in turn, brought out the best in comedy. Today, in a media landscape saturated with screen comedies across platforms, cinematic idioms can feel ubiquitous, and film comedy may appear ordinary. That is why it can be especially refreshing to look back at the genre’s history. There we find an array of eccentric and extraordinary works that contain radical possibilities for how we create and think about moving images today.

Trisha: Are there any readings, films, or in-class activities that you’re particularly excited to teach?

Professor Dong: There are many brilliant readings and films on the syllabus; in fact, it has been challenging to decide what to include and what to leave out, since there are always more. To give just two examples:

One reading I especially look forward to discussing with the class is James Agee’s “Comedy’s Greatest Era.” Written for Life magazine in 1949, it remains one of the finest essays on silent comedy. Agee begins by describing four “grades of laughs” silent films could provoke in an audience: the titter, the yowl, the belly-laugh, and the boffo. He laments that later comedies lost the capacity to deliver belly-laughs and boffos, and then goes on to celebrate the films of the great silent masters. What makes the essay so valuable for us is not only its historical perspective but also Agee’s vivid style – his gusto, flair, and depth of insight make it a piece of criticism as exhilarating as the films it describes.

One film I am particularly excited to include in the syllabus is Parasite (2019), Bong Joon Ho’s comedy-thriller, which will serve as the final film of the semester. Many of us saw it when it was first released, and some may not even think of it as a comedy. It is a perfect example of genre mixture. In comedy as in thriller, a surprise is always just ahead: the next sound, the next shot, the next space revealed, the next person or thing entering, the next move, the next pause… Bong Joon Ho’s mastery of these genre conventions makes Parasite an ideal capstone case study for what we can learn from the history of the genre.

A significant portion of the course’s learning occurs through in-class activities, particularly the sequence analysis exercise. Students will begin in small groups organized by different aspects of cinematic technique: Team Cinematography, Team Mise-en-scène, Team Editing, or Team Sound. Each team focuses solely on its assigned aspect. It will be fascinating for students to discover what they notice when focusing on a single aspect, and to see how each team makes sense of the formal elements and their narrative functions. The teams then share their findings with the class, and this is where things get even more interesting. We see how much more we notice when perspectives are pooled, and together we build a fuller analysis of how filmmakers orchestrate all these interconnected elements to produce meaning and effect. And then we do it all again the following week – with new sequences and new teams. By the end of the semester, everyone will become an expert on every aspect, gaining a sharper eye for film technique and a deeper appreciation of how comedy works on screen.

Please join us in welcoming Professor Dong to the Duke English Department. We will host an event during the 2025-26 academic year featuring Professor Dong, which will provide the Duke community with the opportunity to meet and greet the visiting scholar.