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 journals such as Childhood; Journal of Youth Studies; Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth; The China Quarterly; The China Journal; Modern China; China Information; and Journal of Contemporary China.
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 (forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press), 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 issues such as juvenile delinquency and youth legal awareness in China; 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 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.