Dr Marjorie Dryburgh

BA, PhD (Durham)

Current Research Projects

My research interests focus on Sino-Japanese relations, regional and urban histories in north China and the negotiation of political identities. My current work falls into two areas.

First, I am building on my earlier work on Japanese expansion in pre-war north China to consider what lay behind that military and political process, in a study of the patterns of conflict, cohabitation and collaboration between China and Japan. This draws in questions such as the development of Japanese civilian communities in north China, the impact of Japanese presences and activities outside major urban centres such as Beijing and Tianjin, and the contentious question of collaboration between Chinese groups and the Japanese authorities.

Second, I have a growing interest in life writing in its various forms – biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, diaries, hagiographies... – both in the use of this work as historical evidence by interested parties and in its role in identity formation. I am currently working on memories of empire and occupation in Manchuria, the relation between individual life histories and official or national histories, and the transmission and translation of narratives between different national audiences.

Research Supervision

I welcome applications to undertake postgraduate research on political and social questions in modern China. I am currently sole or joint supervisor for PhD research projects on religious affairs and state-society relations in contemporary China; civil society in the aftermath of the 2008 earthquake; the history and historiography of China’s foreign relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Teaching

My teaching focuses primarily on two areas – China’s modern history and contemporary society – in which our understanding of developments is changing rapidly, with advances in scholarship and with the pace of social change. In both of these areas, there is a mass of source material available, and a central question in the modules that I teach is how we approach that material: how we locate, evaluate and analyse the sources most appropriate to a specific enquiry, how we understand the limitations of our sources, and what we can and can’t reasonably draw from sources that are in some way compromised or partial.

This discipline of thinking, talking and writing critically about problematic source material is central to my own research on China’s inter-war history, but offers a set of approaches that can be applied to any set of evidence. Depending on the specific topic of enquiry, students may be asked to find and to work with academic studies produced by scholars in and beyond East Asia, government communications, the print and broadcast media, popular culture, eyewitness narratives and personal testimony, visual and textual evidence… In class, we will discuss the varying interpretations that can be built on different sources of evidence; in independent study, students will gain experience and confidence in navigating and analysing the evidence available on contemporary and historical China.

I teach undergraduate and postgraduate units including
EAS160 Modern Chinese History
EAS253 Contemporary Chinese Society
EAS6453 Media, State and Society in China
I also contribute to units on modern Japanese and Korean history.

List of Major Publications