About our staff

Twitter: @S_McDowall_

I grew up in New Zealand, where I gained a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington in 2007.  I moved to the UK in 2009 to join a major AHRC-funded project on China’s early modern global connections, led by Anne Gerritsen at the Global History & Culture Centre, University of Warwick.  In 2011, while still at Warwick, I was awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship for my project ‘Landscape & Power in Early Modern China’.  I moved to Edinburgh in 2012 to take up a Chancellor’s Fellowship in History, and I've been here ever since.  Most of the time, I'm either watching cricket, or thinking about watching cricket.    

• Member of the British Association for Chinese Studies.
• Member of the Society for Ming Studies.
• Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
• Member of Advisory Board for 'The Material Culture of Art & Design' book series (Bloomsbury Academic). 

Office Hours (Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays, 11-12; booking required).

Summary of research interests

• Asia
• Britain & Ireland
• Europe

• Comparative & Global History
• Culture
• Ethnicity
• Gender
• Imperialism
• Landscapes & Monuments
• Language & Literature
• Material Culture
• Society

• Early Modern
• Eighteenth Century
• Nineteenth Century
• Twentieth Century & After

I am a cultural and social historian, specialising in late-imperial China and global connections.  My interests include landscape and historical memory, Sino-British relations, the cultures of travel, the long Ming-Qing transition, China in the early modern European imagination, and the material and visual cultures of global connections. 

My first book, Qian Qianyi’s Reflections on Yellow Mountain: Traces of a Late-Ming Hatchet and Chisel (2009), challenged conventional scholarship on the Chinese youji 游記 (travel record), and attempted to re-cast the genre as a culturally-creative discursive practice.  My latest article (Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies) revisits the practice of touring in seventeenth-century China, this time through the lens of the inherited cultural trauma produced by the Ming-Qing transition. 

My current research concerns the ways in which visual signifiers of ‘Chineseness’ functioned in British culture from the eighteenth to early twentieth centuries, a subject I explore 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 (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.  This is the subject of my second book project, and also a significant part of my Honours-level special subject, 'Chinese Whispers: China in Western Minds since 1300' (HIST10438).

• HIST 08032: The Historian's Toolkit.
• HIST 08034: Early Modern History: A Connected World.
• HIST 08044: Introduction to Historiography.
• HIST 08041: Global Connections since 1450.
• HIST08045: History of the United States.
• HIST 10425: Historical Skills and Methods II (Honours).
• HIST 10412: Culture and Society in Early Modern China (Honours Elective).
• HIST 10409: Bitter Weed: A Global History of Tea (Honours Elective).
• HIST 10438: Chinese Whispers: China in Western Minds since 1300 (Special Subject).

• I am the UG Dissertations Coordinator for History (HIST 10309).

• PGHC 11334: Historical Research: Skills & Sources.
• PGHC 11335: Historical Methodology.
• PGHC 11488: A Cultural History of Photography (MSc Elective).

Sam CHENEY, 'Sounds Exotic: British Perceptions and Representations of Chinese Musicality, 1793-1939' (PhD; Principal Supervisor).

Daniel HEATHCOTE, 'Resisting the Nation: Urban Culture and National Identity in Postcolonial Kenya, 1963-1982' (PhD; Assistant Supervisor).

Jane Palomera MOORE, 'The Other Empire's 'Other': Anglophone Accounts of Visitations with the Ainu People, 1869-1921' (PhD; Co-Supervisor).

Willem PAUW, 'Transnational Identity and Culture: The Chinese in Scotland' (PhD; Principal Supervisor).  

Helen PERSSON SWAIN, 'Chinese Painted Silks: Craftsmanship and Fashion in Eighteenth-Century Britain' (PhD, University of Glasgow; Assistant Supervisor). 

QIAN Yuchen, 'Hidden Impressions: British Missionary Photography of China and Japan, 1850-1919' (PhD; Co-Supervisor).

WONG Hiu Man, 'A Study of Firearms in the Ming Dynasty'.  (MSc by Research; Principal Supervisor; Graduated 2019).

Jing ZHU, 'Visualising Ethnicity in the Southwest Borderlands: Gender and Representation in Late Imperial and Republican China'.  (PhD; Co-Supervisor; Graduated 2018).

I am happy to consider proposals relating to the history of China in Western minds, broadly conceived.