Julia Lovell

Julia Lovell is professor of modern Chinese History and Literature at the University of London. She trained in Chinese studies and history at the University of Cambridge and the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre of Chinese Studies. Her research has so far focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building; and on the wide-ranging impacts of modern China’s encounters with the world beyond its borders.

She completed her first two books, The Politics of Cultural Capital (Hawai’i University Press, 2006) and The Great Wall (Atlantic Books, 2006) as a Junior Research Fellow at Queen’s College, Cambridge.

In 2007, she began working at Birkbeck. Since then, her main publications have been The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador/Macmillan, 2011); Splendidly Fantastic: Architecture and Power Games in China (Strelka Press, 2012), Maoism: A Global History (Bodley Head/Knopf, 2019)