Chiang Yee and His Circle

Paul Bevan’s research concerns the impact of Western art and literature on China during the Republican Period (1912-1949), particularly with regard to periodicals and magazines. From 2020 to 2023, he worked as Departmental Lecturer in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture at the University of Oxford. Before that, from 2018 to 2020, he was Christensen Fellow in Chinese Painting at the Ashmolean Museum. 

He is the author of A Modern Miscellany - Shanghai Cartoon Artists, Shao Xunmei’s Circle and the Travels of Jack Chen, 1926-1938 (Leiden: Brill, 2015), and ‘Intoxicating Shanghai’: Modern Art and Literature in Pictorial Magazines during Shanghai’s Jazz Age (Leiden: Brill, 2020). Paul has also translated and curated The Adventures of Ma Suzhen: An Heroic Woman Takes Revenge in Shanghai (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), and Murder in the Maloo: A Tale of Old Shanghai (Earnshaw Books, 2024).  

Sarah Cheang is Head of Programme for the History of Design at the Royal College of Art, London. Her research centres on transnational fashion, ethnicity, material culture and the body from the nineteenth century to the present day, on which she has published widely. Her work on Chinese material culture in Britain spans consideration of ceramics, fashion and textiles, wallpapers, furniture and dogs. 

She is an active member of the Research Collective for Decolonizing Fashion, and the OPEN research initiative.

Craig Clunas is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, and the author of numerous works on Chinese art and culture, particularly of the late imperial and modern periods. His most recent book is The Echo Chamber: Transnational Chinese Painting 1897-1935 (2024).

Anne Witchard is Reader in English Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She is the author of Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown (Farnham, Ashgate, 2007), Lao She in London (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2012), and England’s Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War (London: Penguin, 2014). She is editor, with Lawrence Philips, of London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination (London: Continuum 2010) and of Modernism and British Chinoiserie (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015).

Frances Wood is the retired Curator of the Chinese Collections in the British Library. She has written a number of books on China including The Blue Guide to China (2002), No Dogs and Not Many Chinese: Treaty Port life in China 1843-1943 (1998), The Lure of China: writers on China from Marco Polo to J.G. Ballard (2009) and Great Books of China (2017).

Chair

• Dr Cosima Bruno, Reader in Chinese Literature, SOAS

This event is free to attend, but registration is required. Please note that seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.

• Email: sci@soas.ac.uk

Image credit: Garrett Coakley / CC BY-NC 2.0