Sergey (Seryozha) Zanchevskiy is an HKPFS-funded PhD student in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing. His research interests include Contemporary Chinese Studies, Cinema and Media Studies, Nationalism and Identity Studies, Cultural Studies, and other inquiries into the relations between aesthetics and politics. His PhD project focuses on how recent advances in digital technologies (AI, video surveillance, platformization, etc.) and increased digital censorship have reshaped independent filmmaking in China during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Born in Yekaterinburg (Russia), Sergey studied Sinology as an undergraduate at the Higher School of Economics (Russia) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Israel). Then, he completed a master’s in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University (Taiwan).

Outside academia, he has experience in filmmaking, curating, and editing. As an undergraduate, Sergey founded Vecher (rus. “Evening”), a student cinema club that screened many works by independent filmmakers from Asia and Africa in major cultural venues in Moscow. Currently, he is working on the project entitled On Sinema, a series of video interviews with leading experts in Chinese-language cinemas.