Henrietta Harrison has a PhD from the University of Oxford. She has taught at the University of Leeds and Harvard University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, Professor in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Oxford, and Stanley Ho Fellow in Chinese History at Pembroke College, University of Oxford.

Her main interest is in what ordinary people’s lives have been like in China from the Qing dynasty until today.  She is also enthusiastic about writing the kind of history that tells stories as well as making arguments.  Both of her most recent books have been micro-histories and she have made extensive use of fieldwork in China, especially conducting oral history interviews and collecting village-level materials, as well as using more conventional archives and libraries.

Her research has included the 1911 revolution, nationalism, Confucianism in the twentieth-century, Catholicism, interactions between China and Europe, and above all the history of Shanxi province.  She have worked across different periods, writing two books about the early twentieth century, and two that go back to the eighteenth century. Her current research is on experiences of the 1949 revolution in China.

Her major books include The Perils of Interpreting: The Extraordinary Lives of Two Translators between Qing China and the British Empire, The Man Awakened from Dreams: One Man's Life in a North China Village, 1857-1942, The Missionary’s Curse and Other Tales from a Chinese Catholic Village, The Making of the Republican Citizen: Ceremonies and Symbols in China, 1911-1929, and more.

Email: henrietta.harrison@ames.ox.ac.uk