The Academic Awards Committee of the Columbia College Student Council (CCSC) has announced the recipients of two prestigious faculty awards. Ying Qian, an associate professor of East Asian languages and cultures, has been chosen for the 50th annual Lionel Trilling Book Award, and Eleanor Johnson, an associate professor of English and comparative literature, has been selected for the 64th annual Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching.
Qian was honored for Revolutionary Becomings: Documentary Media in Twentieth-Century China, which the committee said “made the complex links between documentary filmmaking and political upheaval clear and accessible.” Of Johnson, the committee agreed she represents “the best of what Columbia has to offer,” praising her care for her students, her ability to lead and motivate both small and large groups, and her embrace of “the thoughts and ideas of her students, inspiring them to think beyond what is said in class.”
Qian and Johnson will be recognized at a ceremony on Wednesday, May 14, at 6 p.m. in the Faculty Room of Low Library.
The Lionel Trilling Book Award, established in 1976 in honor of Lionel Trilling CC 1925, GSAS’38, is awarded annually to a member of the faculty whose book was published in the previous year and upholds a level of excellence commensurate with Trilling’s legacy. Trilling, a gifted and dedicated Columbia professor committed to undergraduate education, was also a public intellectual known for his scholarship and literary criticism.
Qian’s research focuses on the role of media and mediation in shaping politics, forming knowledge and connecting realms of experience. Revolutionary Becomings, which is her first book, excavates documentary filmmaking’s multi-faceted productivities in China’s revolutionary movements, from the toppling of the Qing Empire in 1911 to the political campaigns and mass protests in the Mao and post-Mao eras. It also develops a media theory of social change centered on “eventfulness,” around which the mutual constitutions of media practice, political relationality and activist epistemology can be examined. Qian’s work has been published or is forthcoming in journals such as Critical Inquiry, New Left Review, positions: asia critique and China Perspectives. She is working on a second book, on “transitional media” and China’s reform and opening.
At Columbia, Qian teaches classes on East Asian cinema, Chinese media cultures, documentary cinema, and comparative media theory and history. Drawing from her experiences in filmmaking, she incorporates creative assignments and encourages students to try hands-on media production. Qian says she is deeply grateful for ongoing conversations with students where the stakes of scholarship and pedagogy become clarified. She also says she has benefited tremendously from the intellectual communities in her home department, East Asian Languages and Cultures, and at the Weatherhead East Asia Institute, Columbia Center for Comparative Media, Institute for Comparative Literature and Societies and Heyman Center for the Humanities.
Revolutionary Becomings also won a Book Award from the History Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication; the award honors the best journalism and mass communication history book published in 2024.
JILL SHOMER
The Mark Van Doren Award for Teaching was established in honor of Mark Van Doren GSAS 1920, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, novelist, playwright, critic, editor and biographer, as well as a renowned scholar and legendary Columbia faculty member. It has been awarded annually since 1962 in recognition of a faculty member’s “humanity, devotion to truth and inspiring leadership.”
Johnson, who teaches Literature Humanities, medieval literature and theology, and the literature and cinema of horror, is the first professor to receive the Van Doren Award and Trilling Book Award in consecutive years (and only the fourth professor to receive both awards in the College’s history). She was honored with the Trilling Award in 2024 for Waste and the Wasters: Poetry and Ecosystemic Thought in Medieval England (2023).
She previously published two other scholarly books about medieval literature: Practicing Literary Theory in the Middle Ages: Ethics and the Mixed Form in Chaucer, Gower, Usk, and Hoccleve (2023) and Staging Contemplation: Participatory Theology in Medieval English Prose, Verse, and Drama (2018).
Her forthcoming book, Scream with Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Cinema, 1968–1980, is a more public-facing book, and will be released by Simon & Schuster in September 2025. She is finishing a book on representations of female monstrosity in western culture.
About the Academic Awards Committee
CCSC’s Academic Awards Committee is composed of 10 students representing a cross-section of classes and majors. The group meets throughout the academic year to determine the book and professor most fitting for awards, reading the books of Trilling Award nominees and auditing the courses of Van Doren Award nominees.
Trilling Award nominations are considered for style, accessibility, scholarship, relevance and whether the committee would recommend the book to their peers. Van Doren Award criteria includes class presentation of material, undergraduate community involvement and mentorship of students.