Prof. Orna Naftali

Abraham Miller Chair in Chinese Studies and Associate Professor at the Department of Asian Studies; Vice Dean for International Affairs at the Faculty of Humanities.

Trained as a cultural anthropologist, my research focuses on childhood, youth, education and the family; gender and sexuality; science and subjectivity; citizenship, national identity, militarization, and the nation-state in modern and contemporary China. 

My work has been published in Childhood; Journal of Youth Studies; Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth; The China Quarterly; The China Journal; Modern China; China Information; Journal of Contemporary China, Oriens Extremus, Nan Nü, and Journal of Current Chinese Affairs.

I am the author of Children, Rights, and Modernity in China: Raising Self-Governing Citizens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), and Children in China (Polity, 2016). My new book, Mobilising China's One-Child Generation: Education, Nationalism, and Youth Militarisation in the PRC (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), draws on the results of qualitative fieldwork and the analysis of Chinese government, media, and educational materials to explore the interface between education, militarization, and the construction of class and gender identities among youth in contemporary China. My current research explores youth legal awareness in China, as well as gender education, and children and the environment in the PRC.  

At the Department of Asian Studies, I teach undergraduate and graduate courses on culture and society, gender and sexuality, family and education, and media and consumption in modern and contemporary China.

I am happy to supervise MA and doctoral students interested in the anthropology of contemporary China; childhood and youth culture in the PRC (1949 to present); popular nationalism and militarization; gender and sexuality; and youth legal consciousness in China.

Current and past MA and PhD students have worked on a variety of topics, including: Ethnicity, language, and class subjectivities of youths of Taiwan–Southeast Asia mixed families; gender, morality and cultural citizenship in overseas Chinese labor migration; factors shaping professional psychology practices in urban China; narratives of the May 4th Movement in Chinese museums; Gender and ethnic identification among ethnic Korean girls in the PRC; fan labor and affective discourses in China; and the forces shaping contemporary policies regarding sexual harassment in China.