CEAS Staff
Song-Chuan Chen, MA (SOAS), PhD (Cambridge)
Postdoctoral Research Associate
Profile
A central theme running through my work to date is that of persons and things that have travelled across boundaries, and how they interact with an alien world. Perhaps the most dramatic example of this in Chinese Studies is that of the western merchants, missionaries, diplomats, individuals, ideas, and innovations that came to China in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I have investigated the history of these foreign people and foreign things in China by taking the long view —the thirteenth century, if not earlier— in order to place the encounter of the past two centuries in its longer-term historical context.
I came to be interested in the New Criticism School of literary theory that thrived in the USA in the 1960s and swayed Taiwan’s literary studies during the 1970s, while I was studying my master degree at Nanhua University Taiwan (2002). Hence my MA dissertation examined the development of the School in Taiwan.
When studying for my second MA at SOAS University of London (2005) I became curious about the translation of nationalism into Chinese and its mingling with indigenous identities and lurking patriotism during the heyday of maritime imperialism. Thus my MA thesis explored how western nationalism was translated, via Japanese, into Chinese in 1903 when Russia made inroads into northeast China. In that year the Chinese elite established the Journal Alarming News about Russia (1903-1904) with the express purpose of arousing “Chinese nationalism”.
My PhD dissertation, entitled “The British Maritime Public Sphere in Canton, 1827-1839”, looks into the English newspapers, journals, pamphlets and Chinese magazines and treatises published by British merchants and Protestant missionaries in Canton during the 1830s. My main argument is that a “British maritime public sphere,” enabled by the print media in Canton and with strong connections to London, was the means by which these merchants and missionaries brought about the First Opium War (1839-1842).
I am currently (2008-2011) working as part of the team on the research project “Colonialism in Comparative Perspective: Tianjin under Nine Flags, 1860-1949”.
Selected Publications
Chen, Song-Chuan, “Chinese Narrator and Western Barbarians: Protestant Missionaries’ Narrative Strategy in Their Geographical Writings, 1819-1839,” in Peter Tze Ming Ng and Wu Xiaoxin eds, Studies in Christianity and Chinese Society and Culture (Hong Kong: Centre for the Study of Religion and Chinese Society, 2008), 391-422.
Chen, Song-Chuan, “‘Intellectual Artillery’: Global Knowledge Circulation and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in China, 1834-1838,” in Lars Laamann eds, A Bridge between Cultures: Commemorating the 200th Anniversary of Robert Morrison’s Arrival in China (Stanford University Press, forthcoming).
