I am currently in the third year of  a PhD under the supervision of Professor Naomi Standen at the University of Birmingham, working on historiography of the Mongol empire. My focus is the Chinese-language Yuanshi (History of the Yuan Dynasty) and the politics of its portrayal of networks and individuals during the reign of Ögödei Qa'an (r.1229-1241). Comparing these to extant funerary inscriptions and other source texts allows the identification of editorial intervention and tailoring, exposing changing cultural and political imperatives during Mongol rule and into the early Ming. In 2013-14 I had the great good fortune to take part in the ERC Mobility, Empire and Cross-Cultural Contacts in Mongol Eurasia project at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, mostly translating and indexing Yuanshi biographies for the project database. I spent the year 2011-12 at the Shida Mandarin Training Centre 國立台灣師範大學國語教學中心 in Taipei in preparation for this (thanks to the Taiwanese Government's Mandarin Enrichment Scholarship, administered in the UK by BACS). I recently spent three months discussing narrative with Professor Yuriko Yamanaka at Minpaku (the National Museum of Ethnology in Osaka) as part of the AHRC International Placement Scheme.

 

Location

Leeds

Disciplines

• History

Affiliation

University of Birmingham