Stephen McDowall

I am a cultural and social historian, with a specific interest in cross-cultural representation.  My interests include travel writing, Sino-Western encounters, Asia in the European imagination, and the material and visual cultures of global connections. 

My current research concerns the ways in which visual signifiers of ‘Chineseness’ functioned in British culture from the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries, a subject I have explored in articles for Cultural and Social History and the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, and which builds upon the previous research I conducted with Professor Anne Gerritsen (published in the Journal of World History).  I am particularly interested in non-textual sources, including photographs, postcards, advertisements, theatre programmes and other ephemera, and the material practices that give such objects their meaning.  These interests feed into my Honours-level special subject, 'Chinese Whispers: China in Western Minds since 1300' (HIST10438), which I have now taught for several years.  In 2025 I was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship to facilitate further research in this area, under the title 'FantAsia: The Spectacle of China in the British Imagination, 1644-1949'. 

For more information about my role within the School of History, Classics & Archaeology, see my departmental webpage.