I joined the Department of History at Trinity in 2015, after three years as the Helen Bruce Lecturer in Modern East Asian History at the University of Aberdeen. Prior to that I taught at the University of Oxford and gained my PhD from the University of Bristol. I research the modern history of China and the global and regional networks that shaped the treaty ports, which were opened to foreign traders by force, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

I arrived at Trinity in 2015, after lecturing at the Universities of Aberdeen and Oxford. I research the modern history of China and the global and regional networks that shaped the treaty ports, which were opened to foreign traders by force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I focus in particular on: The International Settlement at the heart of Shanghai, looking at the transnational form of colonialism in practice there and how it functioned on the ground in the form of the Shanghai Municipal Council. My monograph, Shaping Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2017. The interconnections between China and the British World, especially India, through my work on the Sikh policemen who worked in the Settlement. The evolving Chinese perspectives on and representations of the foreign presence in Shanghai, demonstrating the ways in which political authorities appropriate the past to serve conflicting aims. Social reform in late Qing and early Republican China, focusing on support for and campaigns against the practice of keeping mui tsai or purchased ‘adopted daughters’.