Fran Martin

Biography

Fran Martin is Professor of Cultural Studies in the School of Culture & Communication and co-convenor of the Asian Cultural Research Hub at The University of Melbourne. Her research, supported by five ARC grants to date, has led to advances in scholarly understandings of the transformations that globalization is wreaking in media, gender, sexuality and cultural identity across the transnational Chinese-speaking world. Fran is currently engaged in a multi-phase longitudinal study of the social and subjective experiences of fifty young women from China through the years of their university study in Australia and after. The project has been running since 2012, with its second phase (2015-2020) funded by a Future Fellowship. Fran’s research also addresses television, film, literature, digital cultures and other forms of cultural production across Taiwan, the mainland People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong, and the worldwide Chinese diaspora.

Fran’s research monographs include Dreams of Flight: The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West (Duke U.P., selected for one of two Honourable Mentions by the Francis Hsu Book Prize committee, Society for East Asian Anthropology, 2023);  Telemodernities: Television and Transforming Selfhood in Asia (with T. Lewis and W. Sun, Duke U.P., 2016); Backward Glances: Contemporary Chinese Cultures and the Female Homoerotic Imaginary (Duke U.P., 2010, Finalist, LGBT Studies category, 23^rd Lambda Literary Awards, 2011); and Situating Sexualities: Queer Representation in Taiwanese Fiction, Film and Public Culture (Hong Kong U.P., 2003). Fran previously lectured in Cinema Studies at La Trobe University (2000-2003).