Subject
Asian & Middle Eastern Studies (Chinese)Fellow type
Staff FellowPositions
Staff Fellow and Director of Studies in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (Chinese); Tutor; University Associate Professor of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Literature and Culture
Biography
My path to Chinese Studies began in the sixth form, when friends at the music school I attended in Somerset gave me my first taste of the joys of speaking a few phrases of (mostly very rude) Cantonese and communicating in a language wonderfully unlike the European languages I had studied up until then. I went on to graduate with a BA in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge (Trinity Hall), then spent two years in China studying first at the Inter-University Program at Tsinghua University and then towards an MA in contemporary Chinese literature at Peking University. In 2008 I received my PhD in modern Chinese literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London, writing my dissertation on literary and sociological developments in the mainland Chinese avant-garde poetry scene of the early twenty-first century.