Jonathan Howlett
Chair of the Board of Studies Senior Lecturer in Chinese and Colonial History

Profile

Biography

BA (Bristol), MA (Bristol), MPhil (Oxford), PhD (Bristol)

Dr Jon Howlett is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese and Colonial History. He has published on a range of topics, including: the political and social history of the People’s Republic of China; Sino-British relations; the history of Shanghai; propaganda production; and decolonisation. 

Dr Howlett is a co-director of York’s Asia Research Network and is Regional Coordinator for East Asia. He is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and won a Vice Chancellor’s Teaching Award in 2020. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has served as an elected council member of the British Association for Chinese Studies. 

He has held visiting scholarships at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, East China Normal University (Shanghai), Fudan University (Shanghai), Lund University and Zhejiang University (Hangzhou).

Research

Overview

Dr Howlett’s current research project Semi-Colonial Legacies: how decolonisation and displacement shaped Mao-era China explores the impacts of the Chinese Communist Party’s efforts to eliminate foreign organisations and influences after the revolution of 1949 on ordinary people, Chinese and foreign. 

The subjects of previous publications include: decolonisation in China; the takeover of British companies in Shanghai and Tianjin after the revolution of 1949; symbolic place renaming in socialist Shanghai; ideology and iconoclasm in Liu Shaoqi’s How to be a Good Communist; China’s ‘transition to socialism’ in the early 1950s; and socialist China’s first English language propaganda newspaper, The Shanghai News. Dr Howlett’s co-edited volume Britain and China: Empire, Finance and War offers new perspectives on Sino-British relations in history.

Supervision

Dr Howlett is an experienced supervisor and welcomes applications from prospective postgraduate students on all aspects of China's modern history. He especially welcomes proposals that relate to the social and political history of the People’s Republic of China (1949-present), Sino-foreign relations, colonialism and postcolonialism in China, and the history of Shanghai.

Teaching

Undergraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00104C Arguments and Analysis
• HIS00202H Mao and Maoism 
• HIS00143H Communisms

Postgraduate

An example of modules taught:

• HIS00124M Colonialism in China