Dr Hao Gao

I am a historian of British imperialism in Asia, China in global history, particularly the encounters between the British and the Chinese empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I am generally interested in exploring the mutual understandings and misunderstandings between China and the West in the early processes of globalisation.

My monograph Creating the Opium War: British Imperial Attitudes towards China, 1792-1840 examines British perceptions of and attitudes towards China during their encounters from the Macartney embassy to the outbreak of the Opium War. It makes the first attempt to bring together the political history of Sino-western relations and cultural studies of British representations of China, as a new way of connecting 'top-down' international history with 'bottom-up' global history. The book adds a new dimension to explain the origins of the Opium War, which arguably reshaped Sino-western relations in the modern age.

In addition to my book, I have published peer-reviewed research articles in both English and Chinese journals, including History, Historical Research, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Britain and the World and Beijing Daxue Xuebao (Journal of Peking University).

Born and raised in China, I have been trained as a historian in both British and Chinese academia. I studied in Peking University before I came to the UK. I completed my PhD in University of Edinburgh. I joined University of Exeter in 2015 and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. I currently serve as the University's Academic Director for the UK-China Humanities Alliance (UKCHA), with Exeter as the Lead University on the UK side. In 2022, we were granted a British Council funded project '(Re-)connecting Research in China' (£132,085) for 2022-24 with myself as one of the Project Leads.

Biography:

Born and raised in China, I have been trained as a historian in both British and Chinese academia. I studied in Peking University before I came to the UK in 2009. I completed my PhD in University of Edinburgh in 2013. I was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in University of Sussex and then in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), University of Edinburgh. I joined the University of Exeter in 2015 as Lecturer in Imperial and Global History. I was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2020. I currently serve as the University's Academic Director for the UK-China Humanties Alliance (UKCHA), with Exeter as the Lead University on the UK side.

Research supervision:

I am happy to supervise students who wish to study topics which broadly correlate with my research and teaching interests.