Dr Amy Matthewson BA, MA, PhD, FHEA

• PhD in History, SOAS, University of London, United Kingdom
• MA in History, University of Victoria, Canada
• BA in History, University of British Columbia, Canada

Before joining the School of History and Cultures at the University of Birmingham, I have lived, studied, and lectured in Canada, Taiwan, China, Germany, Iceland, and the UK.

In addition to my academic research, I am active in public engagement. I have given an interview for BBC Witness History discussing the legend of Fu Manchu (2021) and delivered a talk as part of the British Museum exhibition China’s Hidden Century (2023). My collaborative outputs include co-organising an international two-day conference, Visualising Asia: Deciphering ‘Otherness’ in Visual and Material Cultures (2018), a one-day workshop at the British Museum (2019), I worked as part of a team curating the Royal Asiatic Society’s bicentenary exhibition Extraordinary Endeavours (2023), and most recently, I co-organised an international online conference focussed on comics studies in history and the social sciences (2024).

I am a founding member of Asia Collections Network (ACN), a global platform for those with specialist knowledge of and involvement in collections of the arts and artefacts of Asia. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. In 2018, I had the honour of being nominated by my students as a SOAS ‘Shero’ for inspirational and motivational teaching as well as shortlisted for the Director’s Teaching Prize at SOAS, University of London.

My research focusses on Sino-British relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Epistemology underpins much of my work, specifically how we understand peoples and cultures outside our own and how visual and material cultures contribute to the construction and maintenance of ways of knowing. This allows me to explore topics as wide as humour (in cartoon representations), translations (both textually and visually), and representation (through visual and material cultures).

My first monograph, Cartooning China: ‘Punch,’ Power, and Politics in the Victorian Era (Routledge, 2022), explores the series of cartoons of China and the Chinese that were published in the popular British satirical magazine Punch over a sixty-year period from 1841 to 1901 to explore broader frameworks of British socio-cultural and geopolitical discourse. I am currently working on a second monograph exploring the pantomime “Aladdin” during the Victorian era.