Song Hwee LIM received his MPhil and PhD from the University of Cambridge. He taught at the universities of Leeds and Exeter for over twelve years before joining The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) in January 2014. His latest monograph, Taiwan Cinema as Soft Power: Authorship, Transnationality, Historiography, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2022, and its research was funded by a General Research Fund (2015/16) awarded by the Hong Kong government’s Research Grants Council.

Lim is the author of four books (two single-authored, two co-edited) whose pioneering research on slow cinema, world cinema, and queer cinema has opened up new areas of critical inquiry. His first monograph, Celluloid Comrades: Representations of Male Homosexuality in Contemporary Chinese Cinemas (2006), has been praised as “an exemplar of quality scholarship”, “thoughtful, rigorous, and challenging”, and “significantly rais[ing] the bar for future studies on Chinese cinemas and sexualities”. A Chinese translation of the book will be published in 2021. His second book, Tsai Ming-liang and a Cinema of Slowness (2014), has been hailed as a “magisterial study” and “remarkable”, an “indispensable contribution to modern film scholarship” and “to the development of ‘slow cinema studies' as an academic subfield”. It has been translated into Chinese.

As founding editor of the international peer-reviewed Journal of Chinese Cinemas, (published since 2007), Lim has been instrumental in establishing the study of Chinese cinemas as an academic subfield. His two co-edited books, The Chinese Cinema Book (2011; second and expanded edition 2020) and Remapping World Cinema: Identity, Culture and Politics in Film (2006), have been widely adopted on film courses in Anglophone universities.

Lim has also played a leading role in fostering international research collaboration. He was the Principal Investigator of an international networks project funded by the Leverhulme Trust (UK) between 2012 and 2013. At CUHK, he has been founding director of the Centre for Cultural Studies since 2014. Between 2016-18, he was a steering committee member of an Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) international network project on “Soft Power, Cinema and the BRICS”. He has held visiting fellowships at Academia Sinica (Taiwan), Free University Berlin, National Chiao Tung University (Taiwan), National University of Singapore, and Clare Hall, Cambridge, and has delivered keynote lectures in Australia, Britain, and China. He is also Honorary Professor at the University of Exeter.