Dr Heather Inwood

My path to Chinese Studies began in the sixth form, when friends at the music school I attended in Somerset gave me my first taste of the joys of speaking a few phrases of (mostly very rude) Cantonese and communicating in a language wonderfully unlike the European languages I had studied up until then. I went on to graduate with a BA in Chinese Studies from the University of Cambridge (Trinity Hall), then spent two years in China studying first at the Inter-University Program at Tsinghua University and then towards an MA in contemporary Chinese literature at Peking University. In 2008 I received my PhD in modern Chinese literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), the University of London, writing my dissertation on literary and sociological developments in the mainland Chinese avant-garde poetry scene of the early twenty-first century.

My first academic position was as Assistant Professor of modern Chinese cultural studies in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at The Ohio State University, where I taught from 2008 to 2013. After five years in the United States, I came back to the UK to work as a Lecturer in Chinese Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, before returning to Cambridge to take up my current position in 2016. In addition to my academic work, I have written Chinese-language columns for newspapers, websites (e.g. BBC China) and magazines in the UK and China, done translating and interpreting work for ABC Sports, MTV China and other organisations and dabbled in Chinese-language blogging and song writing.