Professional Affiliation

Postdoctoral Researcher SNSF, University of Fribourg, Switzerland; Associated Researcher Priority Program Asia and Europe, University of Zurich, Switzerland

Expert Bio

Ariane Knüsel is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, analyzes political and economic relations between Switzerland and China in the Cold War with a particular focus on how these were affected by European economic actors and Chinese intelligence networks in Europe. She is also an Associated Researcher at the University of Zurich’s Priority Program Asia and Europe. From 2010 to 2015 she was Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Zurich. She received her PhD from the University of Zurich in 2009, was a Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, and holds an MA in Social and Cultural History from Birkbeck College, University of London, as well as an MA in English Literature and Linguistics, History, and Sinology from the University of Zurich. She has received numerous research scholarships, grants and awards, including Swiss National Science Foundation Fellowships, the Eccles Centre Postgraduate Award in North American Studies, and a Research Scholarship of the University of Zurich. She has published widely on Western media perceptions of China, British diplomatic relations with China, Swiss diplomatic and economic relations with China, Asian American History, and Swiss history.

Wilson Center Project

“Sino-Swiss Relations During the Cold War, 1953-1989: Actors and Networks”

Major Publications

Framing China: Media Images and Political Debates in Britain, the USA and Switzerland, 1900-1950, Farnham: Ashgate 2012.

 “Facing the Dragon – Teaching the Boxer Uprising Through Cartoons”, The History Teacher 50/1 (2017): forthcoming.

"'Armé de la pensée Mao Tsé-toung, on peut résoudre tous les problèmes': l'influence de la Révolution culturelle sur les relations de la Suisse avec la République populaire de China", Relations Internationales 3/163 (2015): 29-46.

"'The Chinaman of old cannot be compared to the Chinaman of today': Reports from the Swiss Consulate in Shanghai as Colonial Discourse", in: Harald Fischer-Tiné und Patricia Purtschert (Hg.): Colonial Switzerland: Rethinking Colonialism from the Margins. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan 2015.

"British Conservatives, the Red Menace and Anti-British Agitation in China, 1924-1927", Cultural History, 2:1 (2013): 62-92.

 “‘Western civilization’ against ‘hordes of yellow savages’: British perceptions of the Boxer Rebellion”, Asiatische Studien 62: 1 (2008), pp. 43-83.

“British diplomacy and the telegraph in nineteenth-century China”, Diplomacy and Statecraft 18:3 (2007): 517-537.