Professor Harriet  Evans

Professor Harriet Evans

Visiting Professor

Department of Anthropology

Languages
English, French, Mandarin, Spanish
Key Expertise
China

About me

Harriet Evans has written extensively on the politics of gender and sexuality in China, and on political posters and visual culture of the Mao era. She is currently completing Beijing from Below, an oral history of everyday life since the 1950s in a poor neighbourhood of central Beijing, and has just finished a Leverhulme Trust funded 3-year research project on ‘Conflicts in Culture: Localities and Heritage in Southwest China.’ She is Trustee of the London-based The Rights Practice and works with lawyers representing women seeking asylum in the UK.

 

Expertise Details

Gender and sexuality; feminist movements of the twentieth century; political posters; visual culture and legacies of the Mao era; oral history; memory and urban neighbourhood life; localities; cultural transmission and gendered contestations of heritage

Selected publications

2016: ‘Patriarchal investments: expectations of male authority and support in a poor Beijing neighbourhood’ in Stevan Harrell and Goncalo Santos eds., Transforming Patriarchy: Chinese Families in the 21st Century, Seattle: University of Washington, pp.182-198

2016: ‘Ambiguities of address: Cultural Revolution posters and their post-Mao appeal’, in Jie Li and Enhua Zhang, eds. Red Legacies in China Cultural Afterlives of the Communist Revolution, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, pp.87-114

2014: ‘Reconceptualising heritage in China: museums, development and shifting dynamics of power’, (with Michael Rowlands) in Paul Basu and Wayne Modest, eds. Museums, Heritage and International Development, London: Routledge, pp. 272-294

2014: ‘Neglect of a neighbourhood: oral accounts of life in ‘old Beijing’ since the eve of the People's Republic’ Urban History Vol.41, issue 4, November 2014: 686-704

2010: ‘The gender of communication: changing expectations of mothers and daughters in urban China’, in Harriet Evans and Julia Strauss eds. Gender in Flux; Agency and Change in Contemporary China. Special issue of the China Quarterly 204 (December 2010): 980-1000.

2008: The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in Urban China Rowman & Littlefield

1999: Picturing Power in the People’s Republic of China: Posters of the Cultural Revolution (co-edited with Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Rowman and Littlefield,)

1997: Women and Sexuality in China: Dominant Discourses of Female Sexuality and Gender since 1949, Polity Press