Congratulations to Cinematic Arts PhD Candidate Chris Wei, for receiving the Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award from the Council on Teaching!

Wei double-majored in Psychology and Philosophy during his undergraduate studies, then worked in the mental health industry for several years before returning to school and earning an M.F.A. in Film Studies at Boston University.

As an educator, cinephile, and film scholar, he is most interested in the intersections between time, death, bodies, and storytelling—and in the personal, political, and spiritual ramifications of those intersections. He has written extensively about the cinematic apparatus’ resurrection of the dead through CGI (e.g. the discourse surrounding Peter Jackson’s WWI documentary They Shall Not Grow Old); about doppelgängers and duplication generally; about liberation theology in Breaking Bad; and about the treatment of consciousness and temporality in the films of the experimental animator Don Hertzfeldt.