Hongwei Bao is currently working in collaboration with Queer China UK, a London-based queer Chinese community organisation, on the Drag Up project in London in May 2023. The project aims to work with members from the UK’s queer Chinese community to explore issues of queer community art and decolonisation. Drag artists from China and the UK are invited to share their expertise and experience at the drag theatre-making workshops. The project consists of a series of community-focused drag workshops and will culminates in a public-facing drag exhibition and performance in early July. This Impact and Knowledge Exchange project is supported by the University of Nottingham’s Faculty of Arts’ Communities of Practice grant.

Ting Chang is researching European playing cards, board games, optical devices and panoramas of China in the long 19th century. The project “Playing Empire in the Nineteenth Century: Games, Spectacles and Colonial Subjects” is funded by a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2018-19. She considers physical interaction with Western views of China in the 19th century as a way to form colonial subject positions during a century of Euro-Chinese conflict and war. She investigates the ways in which these objects used bodily interaction to produce pre-digital immersive experiences and to model power relations between Britain, France and China. This new project explores the multi-layered interactions and forms of learning they offered to audiences of different ages and classes in Europe. She will pursue her research as a Visiting. Fellow at the Yale Center for British Art and Short-Term Research Fellow at the
UCLA William Clark Memorial Library in spring 2020.

Sarah Dauncey has pioneered a new field relating to disability in modern Chinese culture. Her work has focused on the development of new ways of understanding disability in a non-Western context, a much neglected area of study. In particular, she has examined how people with various types of impairment are depicted in different types of media and how these images contribute to the formation and articulation of identities, both collective and individual. She has recently completed “Disabled but not Useless: Disability and Identity in Modern Chinese Literature and Culture,” a project funded by the British Academy, which focuses on key political personalities (Zhang Haidi), writers (Shi Tiesheng, Han Shaogong, Bi Feiyu), film directors (Xie Jin), whose lives and works have influenced the way in which disabled people are viewed and view themselves in the post-reform era. The results of this project will be published in her forthcoming monograph Disability in China: Citizenship, Identity and Culture (Cambridge University Press).

Mark Gallagher’s current research project on male acting and stardom in global cinema includes attention to Hong Kong and Chinese screen actors who have maintained profiles in global film productions from the 1980s to present.

Gaik Cheng Khoo is currently focusing on Koreans who are in Malaysia for study, work, travel and retirement. The project regards Koreans living in Malaysia as reflective of a changing mindset among South Koreans towards developmentalism and the national obsession of becoming an advanced nation. This manifests in attitudes towards time, quality of life and affect.

Chun-Yi' Lees current research interest aims to investigate the influence of different foreign investors on Chinese workers and labour rights. Using interviews, participant observation and cases studies, this current research project aims to examine the emergence of civil society in this dynamic interaction among the state, foreign capital, and labour in China. In October 2011, she started to work with Prof. Andreas Bieler on an ESRC research project: 'Globalisation, national transformation and workers' rights: An analysis of Chinese labour within the global economy'. 

Bingjian Liu is currently working on digital fabrication on the preservation of antique porcelain and its derivative product design, and a project titled ‘Suzhou’s Tiger Hill Wedding Street: Modernity, Material Culture, and Bridal Fashion.

Daniel Mutibwa is working with a range of hardware entrepreneurs and other stakeholders including makerspaces, co-working hubs, innovation labs and scholars in China (Shenzhen), Hong Kong and Taiwan (Taipei and Kaohsiung) to understand the breadth and value of grassroots design and digital fabrication. His focus is particularly on processes of production and organisation as well as work conditions and perceptions thereof. Daniel’s current research is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and the British Council (BC), both of whom have identified contemporary digital fabrication as being of strategic importance to the digital economy in the forthcoming years.

Lonán Ó Briain is currently working on RadioAsiaPacifika: Cultural Broadcasting in the Asia Pacific region (funded by AHRC). His first book, Musical Minorities: The Sounds of Hmong Ethnicity in Northern Vietnam, has been published by Oxford University Press.

Scott Pacey examines Buddhist-Christian Dialogue in Post-War Taiwan.

Gary’s Rawnsley’s research is located at the intersection of international relations and international communications. He has written extensively on “soft power”, public and cultural diplomacy, propaganda, and international broadcasting, as well as the media and democracy, and political cinema. Having authored a Green Paper for the British Council on Britain’s soft power, he is now writing a book called What is Soft Power? Other large projects include editing The Handbook of Political Propaganda (for Edward Elgar); and a special issue (edited with Michael Keane) of Global Media and China on the theme, Data on Demand: Ranking the nation, predicting the future.

Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley is currently working on The Media and Political Communication in Taiwan (with Jonathan Sullivan and Gary Rawnsley) and Taiwan’s Lost Commercial Cinema: Recovered and Restored (with Chris Berry). 

Jeremy E. Taylor is Principal Investigator on “Cultures of Occupation in 20th century Asia”. This project is funded by the European Research Council (2 million euros) to examine the influence of foreign occupation on cultural expression in East and Southeast Asia in the modern era. He is also Principal Investigator on a British Academy (£28,000) International Partnership Project entitled ‘Cultures of the Chinese Cold War in Southeast Asia, 1949-1963’, which looks at late colonial responses to and debates about the circulation of Chinese language media in Malay(si)a and Singapore in the 1950s and early 1960s.

Andrew White is involved in an AHRC bid for funding on the development of short movies on social issues for the Chinese market. He is also part of a collaborative project on the impact of the strengthening of copyright regimes on the development of the Chinese short movie industry.

Xiaoling Zhang has published widely on China’s media, culture and society, more recently focusing on the creative industries’ role in the nation’s attempt to refresh its image and to build its international soft power. She researches on the evolving policies, the development of the industries as part of China’s economic development, the cultural market, and the wider social transformation as China develops towards a creative society. 

Corey Kay Nelson Schultz's areas of research are contemporary Chinese visual culture and film phenomenology. I am also currently exploring representations of Jews and Jewishness in contemporary China. I am a former Member and currently an Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute for the Study of Jewish / Non-Jewish Relations at the University of Southampton.