Professional Affiliation

Reader in Modern Chinese History and Literature, Birkbeck, University of London

Expert Bio

Julia Lovell has worked at Birkbeck since 2007. Before then, she was Junior Research Fellow at Queens’ College, Cambridge. She completed her undergraduate and graduate studies at Emmanuel College, Cambridge; she also studied for a year at the Hopkins-Nanjing Centre for 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 she is now working on a global history of Maoism (to be published by Bodley Head), which will explore the ways in which Maoist politics and culture travelled beyond China after the 1940s to become an international political force in Asia, the Americas, Africa and Europe. Lovell is also an active translator of Chinese literature into English.

Major Publications

• The Politics of Cultural Capital: China’s Quest for a Nobel Prize in Literature (Hawai’i University Press, 2006)
• The Great Wall (Atlantic Books, 2006)
• The Opium War: Drugs, Dreams and the Making of China (Picador/Macmillan, 2011)
• Splendidly Fantastic: Architecture and Power Games in China (Strelka Press, 2012)
• (Selected Translations)
• A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong (Columbia University Press, 2003)
• I Love Dollars, by Zhu Wen (Columbia University Press, 2007)
• Lust, Caution, by Zhang Ailing (Penguin Classics, 2007)
• Serve the People, by Yan Lianke (Constable and Robinson, 2008)
• The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Stories of China: The Complete Fiction of Lu Xun (Penguin Classics, 2009)
• The Matchmaker, The Apprentice and the Football Fan, by Zhu Wen (Columbia University Press, 2013)