Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese and East Asian History
I am a historian of modern China in its global and regional contexts, with a particular interest in the intersections of the Second World War, Asianism and post-war, post-colonial world-making. My first book project examines how in the late 1930s and 1940s Chinese and Indian policymakers and intellectuals imagined post-war Asia. To this end, I investigate Chinese and Indian attitudes towards Asian nationalist movements, migrant status in host countries and regional reconstruction. My work reveals how China and India attempted to revive Asianism, which was thought to have faded with Japan’s defeat in 1945, in competing ways. Moving beyond the perspective of superpower struggle, I highlight China’s and India’s agency in shaping their region as well as the opposition within Asia itself. Representatives of both countries used international conferences and organisations to promote their visions but were questioned by many of their Southeast Asian counterparts.
My works have appeared in the Journal of Contemporary History and the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. At Oxford, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on modern China as well as undergraduate world history courses. Before taking this post, I taught world history in the twentieth century at LSE. I conducted research on the flow of people, institutional practices and goods between Hong Kong and the Commonwealth, and on the Sino-British negotiations in the 1980s over Hong Kong’s future. I hold a DPhil in History from Oxford, an MPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies from the University of Cambridge and a BA from the University of Hong Kong.
