— ABOUT
In my writing, research, and teaching I am interested in how China and Japan have historically understood their place in the world, and their role in shaping a changing international order.
Credit: Flashpoint Labs
— MORE ABOUT ME
I am Associate Professor in the Strategic & Defence Studies Centre at The Australian National University, and Deputy Director (Research) in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. I am the author of China-Japan Relations after World War Two: Empire, Industry and War, 1949-1971 (Cambridge University Press, 2016). The holder of an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship and a Westpac Research Fellowship, I lead a team researching China’s role in shaping the international economic order.
I received my D.Phil in International Relations and M.Phil in Modern Chinese Studies from the University of Oxford, where my doctorate won the Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Prize for an outstanding thesis in the area of international peace and understanding. I have undertaken intensive language study and fieldwork in China, Japan and Taiwan over the past 15 years, and engage regularly with the Australian policy community on issues of contemporary foreign and security policy.
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BA(Hons I), BBus (UniSA)
MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies (Distinction) (Oxon)
DPhil in International Relations (Oxon)
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Westpac Research Fellowship (2017-2023)
Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship (2017-2022)
Paul Bourke Award for Early Career Research (Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, 2017)
ANU College of Asia and the Pacific Award for Teaching Excellence (2015)
Dasturzada Dr Jal Pavry Memorial Prize (University of Oxford, 2013)
T.D. Allman Scholarship (St Antony’s College, Oxford, 2011-2012)
Rhodes Scholarship (Australia-at-Large & Trinity, 2007)
— MY STORY
I grew up in the southern suburbs of Adelaide, and began studying the Japanese language at the age of 12.
After years of classroom-based learning, I finally had the chance to visit Japan in 2004, when I became an undergraduate exchange student at Okayama University. In Okayama, most of my classmates were from China and Taiwan. During my year in Japan, we watched as major anti-Japanese protests sprung up in cities across China, and spent hours talking about what those protests meant for the China-Japan relationship.
When I returned to Australia, I was determined to learn more about China and to find a way to study Chinese. Receiving a Rhodes Scholarship in 2007, I spent the next five years travelling between Oxford and Beijing, studying the Chinese language, its history, and foreign relations.
Between 2008 and 2012, I spent months visiting the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives in Beijing, where I carried out the research for my doctorate and first book on the China-Japan relationship after World War Two. Having access to these archives, during this brief window of relative openness in China, was extraordinarily fortuitous: it allowed me to observe Chinese Communist Party ideas about Japan in the wake of the war, and to understand why the CCP was so determined to rebuild the post-war relationship.
Beyond China and Japan, my work has focused on gender equity in higher education and political life. I have led gender equity strategies and initiatives at the University of South Australia, Oxford and ANU, and co-authored research with Andrew Leigh on the effects of gender on election outcomes in Australia. In 2021, I was awarded the ANU’s Clare Burton Award for Excellence in Equity and Diversity.
— EXPLORE
— FEATURED PROJECT
How China Shapes International Economic Order
Through an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellowship and a Westpac Research Fellowship, I lead a research team investigating China’s role in shaping the post-WWII international economic order, and the contemporary legacy of China’s historical economic ideas.