Jonathan Howlett
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-founder of York’s Asia Research Group 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 served as an elected member of the council of the British Association for Chinese Studies (2013-2016). 

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 Decolonisation at the Margins: socialist revolution and the legacies semi-colonialism in Shanghai, 1949-1976 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 revolution of 1949; place name renaming in socialist Shanghai; ideology and iconoclasm in Liu Shaoqi’s seminal text 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

• Colonists, Capitalists and Gangsters: Republican Shanghai, 1911-49 (first year Period Topic module)
• Society and Politics in Communist China Since 1949 (second year Explorations module)
• Communisms (final year Comparative module)

Postgraduate

• Twentieth-Century China (MA option module)