Margaret Hillenbrand FBA
Fellow and Tutor in Chinese
Biography
Margaret Hillenbrand is Professor of Modern Chinese Literature and Culture and Tutorial Fellow in Chinese at Wadham.
"I research literary and visual culture in contemporary China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. My most recent book is On the Edge: Feeling Precarious in Contemporary China, which was published by Columbia University Press in 2023. Research for this book was supported by a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2020-2021) and a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2021-2023). The book explores precarity as it is experienced in contemporary China, and it argues that academic studies of this condition require radical expansion so as to include the complex experiences of the world’s second most populous nation. The book’s approach is interdisciplinary, fusing art history, digital media, and performance studies with citizenship and labour studies. This book was awarded the MLA Scaglione Prize for East Asian Studies in 2024. Podcasts and interviews about the book can be found here:
View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture
Before working on precarity in China, I focused on the relationship between photography and modern Chinese history. This research was published in Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China, which appeared with Duke University Press in 2020. This book intervenes in the established historiography of modern China by arguing that public secrecy, rather than censorship and amnesia alone, explains the absence of core episodes from the national commemorative landscape. The book also develops the theoretical concept of the photo-form – a historical photograph repurposed in paint, ink, celluloid, fabric, or any other artistic medium – and shows how these works can murmur truth to power. Podcasts and interviews about the book can be found here:
Professor Margaret Hillenbrand in conversation with Professor Adriana X Jacobs (YouTube)
My first book, Literature, Modernity, and the Practice of Resistance: Japanese and Taiwanese Fiction, 1960-1990 (Brill, 2007), compares responses to modernity in the literary cultures of Japan and Taiwan during the postwar period. Moving beyond the East-West framework that has traditionally dominated comparative enquiry, the book analyses East Asian literature on its own terms via an intertext of cognate fictional works which challenge state-stewarded modernity in these two miracle economies.
I am now working on a new project about the cultural politics of the face in Chinese visual culture during the era of biometric surveillance, cosmetic surgery, global pandemic, and masked protest. This project explores the face via a broad archive of materials, including memes, social media posts, performance art, livestreaming apps, government propaganda, site-specific installations, political cartoons, graffiti and street art, cosmetic surgery diaries, protest masks, and AI-generated portraits. An article from this project, entitled “Portals to the Soul: Facial Recognition Technologies and Chinese Portraiture” was recently published in Critical Inquiry.
I have also edited two journal special issues: The Colour of Chinese Cinemas (Journal of Chinese Cinemas 6/3, 2012) and Contemporary East Asia, in Theory (Postcolonial Studies 13/4, 2020).
I edit a book series at Edinburgh University Press, entitled Edinburgh Studies in East Asian Film, and I convene the Oxford Seminar on Visual Culture from Modern and Contemporary China.
I took my BA in Chinese and Japanese at Pembroke College, Cambridge. After working and studying in East Asia for several years, I completed my MA in modern Chinese literature at the University of Edinburgh, and my DPhil in East Asian comparative literature at Merton College, Oxford. Before coming to Oxford in 2009, I held a Chuan Lyu Fellowship in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge, and a lectureship in modern Chinese culture and language at SOAS, University of London."