Professor Barbara Mittler (Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) / Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University)

Professor Barbara Mittler (Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) / Institute of Chinese Studies, Heidelberg University)

Barbara Mittler holds a Chair in Chinese Studies at the Institute of Chinese Studies, University of Heidelberg and is Director of the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (formerly the Cluster of Excellence “Asia and Europe in a Global Context.”) She began her studies of Sinology at the University of Oxford (MA Oxon 1990), and has spent research periods in Taiwan (Academia Sinica), the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong,  at Harvard and Stanford.

In 2000 she received the Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Prize for young and outstanding scholars by the German Research Foundation and the German Ministry of Culture. Between 2002-2004 she was a recipient of a Heisenberg Fellowship awarded by the German Research Foundation. In 2008 she was elected member of the National Academy of Sciences LEOPOLDINA and, more recently, in 2013, the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. In 2009 she won the Henry Allen Moe Prize in the Humanities, American Philosophical Society, and most recently, in 2013, her book-length study of the Chinese Cultural Revolution has won the Fairbank Prize by the American Historical Association. She will be Visiting Professor at the Department of East Asian Studies in 2014 and Short Residency Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center in 2015.

Her research focuses on cultural production in (greater) China covering a wide range of topics from music to (visual) and (historical) print media in China's long modernity. She has published numerous research papers and three book-length studies: Dangerous Tunes: The Politics of Chinese Music in Hong Kong, Taiwan and the People's Republic of China since 1949 , Harrassowitz 1997; A Newspaper for China? Power, Identity and Change in China’s News-Media, 1872-1912 , Harvard University Press, 2004; A Continuous Revolution: Making Sense of Cultural Revolution Culture , Harvard University Press, 2012 (Fairbank Prize 2013). Currently, she is finishing two book-length studies, one on women’s magazines, Portrait(s) of a Trope: Making New Women and New Men in Chinese Women’s Magazines, 1898-2008 , the other, jointly with historian Thomas Maissen on Chronologics: Why China did not have a Renaissance and why that matters—an interdisciplinary Dialogue .