Prof Margaret Hillenbrand

Margaret Hillenbrand is Associate Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Tutorial Fellow in Chinese at Wadham.

After taking a BA in Chinese and Japanese at the University of Cambridge, she worked and studied in East Asia for some years before completing a DPhil at Oxford in East Asian comparative literature. Margaret joined Wadham in 2009. Before this, she held a Chuan Lyu Fellowship in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge, and a lectureship in modern Chinese culture and language at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

She teaches courses on Chinese literature, film and cultural history during the modern and contemporary periods. Her research and publications to date have focused on literary and visual culture in twentieth-century China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Japan, and she has recently finished a book on the relationship between historic photographs and public secrecy in China during the post-Mao period. She is now working on a new project about the aesthetics of precarity in twenty-first-century China.