Dr Julia Lovell
Research interests* Teaching interests* Publications* Areas of research supervision* Contact details
Research Interests
My research has so far focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building. I am currently working on a new history of the Opium Wars that will examine the conflicts themselves from both the Chinese and British sides, and trace the impact they have had on the subsequent century and a half of China’s relationship with the West. Exploring the historiography of the wars up to the present day, I plan to plot out the foundational influence they have had on modern Chinese nationalism and on Western perceptions of China, as well as the complex historical realities that have been obscured by the processes of national myth-making.
In 2006, I published The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature, which provided a detailed history of the links between literature and modern Chinese nationalism. By focusing on China’s preoccupation with winning a Nobel Literature Prize, the book explored the key themes of Chinese modernity: anxiety about China’s international status and desire for global equality, an ambivalence towards Western influences and values, and the troubled relationship between Chinese intellectuals (especially writers) and national politics. Incorporating histories of the Nobel Prize and of China’s modern literature, my account of changing Chinese attitudes to the prize since the early 20th century considered the contradictory mix of admiration, resentment and anxiety that intellectuals and writers have felt towards international values whilst attempting to forge a modern Chinese literary and cultural identity. Through my work as a critic and translator of Chinese fiction, I continue to have an active research interest in modern and contemporary Chinese literature.
Also in 2006, I published The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC-AD 2000 (Atlantic Books), a chronological, narrative account of China’s most iconic national monument. By analysing the origins of the myth of a single, continuous, millennia-old Great Wall – the way in which China’s frontier walls have in recent centuries been reinvented as a symbol of a fictitiously isolationist Chinese nation – I further explored my strong interests in the rise of modern Chinese nationalism, contextualising it within a broad survey of the changing political and cultural world views that have developed throughout China’s past.
Teaching Interests
Modern Asian history; Contemporary History & Politics; Social and Cultural History; History of Ideas; Imperialism and Post-Colonial Societies. In 2007-8, I will be offering an MA option in Literature and Modern Chinese Nationalism, and in 2008-9 an undergraduate Group 2 course on Modern Chinese Revolutions.
Publications
Books
The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (University of Hawai’i Press, 2006)
The Great Wall: China Against the World 1000 BC-AD 2000 (Atlantic Books, 2006)
Articles
“Gao Xingjian, the Nobel Prize, and Chinese Intellectuals: Notes on the Aftermath of the Nobel Prize 2000,” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 14, no. 2 (Fall, 2002), 1-50
“Misty in Roots: Chinese Poetry After Mao,” The Poetry Review 26, no. 3 (Autumn, 2002), 64-68
“From Satire to Sensationalism: Chinese Fiction in the 1990s,” China Review, autumn/winter 2001, 28-32
“Beijing 2008: The Mixed Messages of Contemporary Chinese Nationalism,” forthcoming in The International Journal of the History of Sport (2008)
Translations
A Dictionary of Maqiao, by Han Shaogong (Columbia University Press, 2003)
Sky Burial, by Xinran (Chatto and Windus, 2004)
I Love Dollars: And Other Stories of China, by Zhu Wen (Columbia University Press, 2006)
Serve the People!, by Yan Lianke (Constable and Robinson, 2007)
Lust, Caution, by Eileen Chang (Penguin Classics, 2007)
Areas of research supervision
Modern Chinese literary and cultural history; literary prizes and institutions; post-Mao China; history of Western perceptions of China.
Contact Details
Room: 453 (Malet Street)
Email: j.lovell@bbk.ac.uk
Tel: 020 7631 6423