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Contributors

Timothy Cheek – Professor

has been a professor at UBC since 2002 teaching in the IAR’s Asian policy program. His research, teaching and translating focus on the recent history of China, especially the role of Chinese intellectuals in the twentieth century and the history of the Chinese Communist Party. His books include The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History (2015), Living with Reform: China Since 1989 (2006), Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions (2002) and Propaganda and Culture in Mao’s China (1997). In the MPPGA program he teaches GPP 508 on policy in place and seminars on Chinese and Asian media and policy issues.

His research interests include 20th century Chinese history, the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the role of intellectuals in public life in China. His research work focusses on the following areas:

Contemporary Thought and Society in China. The ideas, debates, writings, and roles of intellectuals in contemporary China with a focus on “certified knowledge” and institutions of intellectual life. Most recent publication in this stream: The Intellectual in Modern Chinese History(Cambridge University Press, 2015).

Mao Zedong. Translating and editing Mao texts with Stuart Schram for vol. VIII of Mao Zedong’s Road to Power, being the complete works of Mao in English for 1942-1945. Published in July 2015.

Thinking about Chinese Thinking. An interdisciplinary project to coordinate the disciplines of history, social psychology, and political theory in the study of Sinophone discourse about public issues and ideologies, such as liberalism. Current SSHRC project on “Reading and Writing the Chinese Dream” focuses on public intellectuals in China today (co-directed with Joshua A. Fogel, York University, and David Ownby, University of Montreal).

Neil Pemberton – Research Associate

is a cultural historian of medicine and modern Britain at the University of Manchester. He has explored the history of disability, the history of animal-human relations and the history of detection and forensic medicine. His latest book Murder and the Making of English CSI has been recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Currently, he is completing an AHRC-funded co-authored book project titled Fancy Dogs and the Fancy: Pedigree Dog Breeding in Nineteenth-Century Britain, as well as his new monograph on The Poop Scoop Revolution and the Multi-Species Politics of Dog-Walking and Dog-Fouling in Modern Britain.

Piers Robinson – Professor 

is Chair in Politics, Society and Political Journalism at the University of Sheffield. He researches communication, media and world politics, focusing on conflict and war. His work has been cited in publications such as ‘The Responsibility to Protect’, published by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (ICISS), and he has received many invitations to lecture and advise on these topics, for example at the NATO Defence College in Rome, at Oxford (UK senior military commanders) and by the Stop the War Coalition.

His current research focuses on organised persuasive communication (OPC) and contemporary propaganda. The development and application of a conceptual framework, designed to examine deceptive and non-deceptive OPC, has been applied to the case of the 2003 Iraq War and is now published. This research is being developed into a broader research agenda aimed at theorising and researching OPC and he is currently working with Professor Vian Bakir (Bangor), Professor Eric Herring (Bristol) and Professor David Miller (Bath) on a number of projects including a major research funding bid aimed at examining OPC and propaganda during the post-9/11 ‘war on terror’, a conceptual paper and a monograph on OPC.

Maximilian Schochow – Research Assistant

is a research assistant at the Institute of History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine at the University of Ulm, Germany. He studied theatre and political science, before he moved into the natural sciences, writing his PhD about the systematics of intersex. From this diverse background, Schochow started his career as a medical historian in 2011 at the Insitute of Medical History and Ethics at the Martin Luther University in Halle in 2011.

His main research fields are the history of science, Gender and Diversity Studies and injustice in medicine in totalitarian states. Together with Prof. Steger, he currently works on the projects about pharmaceutical tests of West German companies in East Germany during the Cold War and its ethical implications, as well as about the venereological departments and the treatment of women within the premises of these institutions across East Germany and Central Eastern Europe.

Florian Steger – Professor

is the Director of the Institute of History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine and simultaneously the Head of the Ethical Commission at the University of Ulm, Germany. He studied medicine, classical philology and history, and published extensively about various periods within the history of medicine.

His main research fields are ancient medicine, the field of medicine and arts (esp. literature), injustice in medicine in totalitarian states and bioethics. Together with his team, he currently works on the projects about pharmaceutical tests of West German companies in East Germany during the Cold War and its ethical implications, the history of medical care at the workplace in East Germany, the ethical issue of the Anti-D-Prophylaxis in 1978 in East Germany, that was given to rhesus-negative women one hour after the birth of their child and caused a Hepatitis infection, as well as about the venereological departments and the treatment of women within the premises of these institutions across East Germany and Central Eastern Europe.

David Welch – Emeritus Professor 

was appointed Professor of Modern History at the University of Kent and later, the first Director of the Centre for the Study of War, Propaganda and Society, which he set up at Kent in 1995.

His main research interest is in twentieth-century political propaganda. His work previous to this has been in the area of the late nineteenth and twentieth-century German history, focusing on the relationship between public opinion, politics, and propaganda in German society. His publications include Germany: Propaganda & Total War 1914-18 (Rutgers University Press, 2000), The Third Reich: Politics, and Propaganda (Routledge, revised second edition, 2002), Hitler: Profile of a Dictator (Routledge, 2001), Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933-1945 (I.B.Tauris, 2001), and Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia from 1500 to the Present [with D. Culbert and N. Cull] (ABC Clio, 2003), Justifying War: Propaganda, Politics and the Modern Age [with Jo Fox] (Palgrave, 2012).

Jia Zhen – Research Assistant Professor

received her B.A and M.A. in Art History from the Academy of Arts and Design, Tsinghua University, and her PhD from the Department of Fine Arts, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. From 2005-2010, she taught several courses at the Luxun Academy of Fine Arts.

Her research interests focus on gender issues in art history and visual culture in the Chinese context, especially the significance of women as the subjected matter and the practitioner. Her PhD thesis “Images of Masculine Women in Chinese Print Media (1920s -1940s)” analyses the specific characteristics of this specific type of women’s images and explains the imagery from a gender-based prospective. She is also interested in the production of objects in the 20th century.