Li-An Ko is a PhD candidate in film studies at the Department of Media and Culture Studies and the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University. Her doctoral research, titled "Beyond Sadness: Historical Films in the Post-martial Law Period of Taiwan (1987-2017)," lies in the subject area of cinema and history and focuses on feature films that represent the colonial past and suppressed histories of Taiwan. For the research Ko was awarded a scholarship (2017-2019), the Government Scholarship to Study Abroad (the GSSA), from the Ministry of Education, Taiwan. As a researcher, she is interested in historical representation in film, audiovisual history, historical amnesia, and film aesthetics. She is a fan of Hayao Miyazaki and Charlie Chaplin.