Professor Henrietta Harrison

Stanley Ho Fellow and Tutor in Chinese, Professor of Modern Chinese Studies

I am a historian of modern China, who specialises in social and cultural history.  I did my undergraduate degree in Classics, then learned Chinese and became inspired by it.  I previously taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, and in the Department of History at Harvard University.  Here at Oxford I enjoy being back in a Chinese department where our students have such a good background, and by the third year can read original Chinese documents and really get deeply into the subject as well as the opportunity to work closely with the Pembroke students doing Chinese.


For my research I enjoy talking to old people in Chinese villages as well as reading books and documents and much of my work has been about ordinary people and their everyday lives in Shanxi province: I wrote one book about a Confucian teacher living through the early years of the 20th century and another about people’s lives in an entirely Catholic village.  My most recent book stepped beyond this to look at the history of interpreters and the dangers of their profession as China faced the rise of the British empire in the late 18th and early 19th century.  I am now starting a new project on what it was like to live through China's communist revolution and will be teaching an undergraduate option on everyday life in Mao’s China.  
 

In addition, as well as teaching for our two undergraduate core courses on the History and Culture of East Asia and on Modern China, I also teach some Classical Chinese and offer an undergraduate option on China and the World and a masters’ option on the History and Historiography of Modern China.

Professor Henrietta Harrison

Stanley Ho Fellow and Tutor in Chinese, Professor of Modern Chinese Studies

I am a historian of modern China, who specialises in social and cultural history.  I did my undergraduate degree in Classics, then learned Chinese and became inspired by it.  I previously taught in the Department of East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds, and in the Department of History at Harvard University.  Here at Oxford I enjoy being back in a Chinese department where our students have such a good background, and by the third year can read original Chinese documents and really get deeply into the subject as well as the opportunity to work closely with the Pembroke students doing Chinese.


For my research I enjoy talking to old people in Chinese villages as well as reading books and documents and much of my work has been about ordinary people and their everyday lives in Shanxi province: I wrote one book about a Confucian teacher living through the early years of the 20th century and another about people’s lives in an entirely Catholic village.  My most recent book stepped beyond this to look at the history of interpreters and the dangers of their profession as China faced the rise of the British empire in the late 18th and early 19th century.  I am now starting a new project on what it was like to live through China's communist revolution and will be teaching an undergraduate option on everyday life in Mao’s China.  
 

In addition, as well as teaching for our two undergraduate core courses on the History and Culture of East Asia and on Modern China, I also teach some Classical Chinese and offer an undergraduate option on China and the World and a masters’ option on the History and Historiography of Modern China.