Dr Andrea Janku

I studied Classical and Modern Sinology, Romance languages and literatures, and Sociology at the University of Heidelberg, and Chinese literature in Shanghai. 

The research for my PhD thesis on political editorials in the late nineteenth-century Shanghai press was part of a larger project on the Shanghai Chinese-language press in foreign possession and the transformation of the Chinese public sphere. Before joining SOAS I was an assistant professor in Classical Sinology at the University of Heidelberg. 

While my interests in the field of China’s social and intellectual history continue to be relatively broad, my own active research has moved to the history of disasters in the early modern period and environmental history more generally. I’m currently working on a monograph on the experience of famine in late Qing and early Republican China and pursuing a collaborative project on landscapes and environmental change.

Previous PhD Students

• Ellan Lincoln-Hyde, 'Western Classical Music in China: Case Studies of its Dissemination from the Mid-nineteenth to Early Twentieth Centuries' (2023)
• Ling-chieh Chen, 'War and Postal Communication in Republican China' (2023)
• Junda Lu, 'The State as the Celestial: Roots of Statism in Modern China, 1820-1893' (2023)
• Jennifer Bond, 'Foreign Puppets, Christian Mothers or Revolutionary Martyrs? The Multiple Identities of Missionary School Girls in East China, 1917-1952' (2018)
• Lin Jiao, 'Nation, fashion and women’s everyday lives : breast-binding in China, 1910s-1970s,' 2017.
• Fion So, ‘Navigating protectionism: Diederichsen, Jebsen & Company in German Qingdao and the world, 1898-1908,’ 2014.
• Lifeng Han, ‘Carnival politics: festival spectacle and ritual in Song China, 960-1279,’ 2012.
• António Barrento, ‘On the move: tourist culture in China, 1895-1949,’ 2012.
• Jocelyn Chatterton, ‘Protestant medical missionary experience during the war in China, 1937-1945: the case of Hubei province,’ 2010.