Research Background

I am an Associate Professor (Docent) in the Study of Modern China and Director of the PhD Programme at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, Lund University. Prior to taking up my position at Lund, I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. I completed my PhD in China Studies at the University of Leeds in 2015.

My research is interdisciplinary in nature, and sits at the nexus of contemporary China Studies, Development Studies, and Political Economy. I have done extensive research on the provision of financial services in China, particularly credit and debt relations in rural areas and digital spaces. My current research is focused on Chinese globalisation and the extractive industries, and investigates informal and bottom-up Chinese participation in resource booms from past to present and in both the physical and digital realms. Specifically, I am conducting in-depth archival research and qualitative fieldwork on Chinese participation in the 19th-century Victorian gold rush, the contemporary gold rush in Ghana, and the global bitcoin mining boom. I am currently the PI of the project 'After the Gold Rush: Informal Resource Extraction in the Shadows of Global China', funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond and a Co-I on the project 'Chinese Global Orders' funded by the British Academy. I have published widely on contemporary Chinese politics and society, rural development, microcredit and digital finance, migration and resource extraction, qualitative methods, and open science and academic freedom. I am the author of Development on Loan: Microcredit and Marginalisation in Rural China (Amsterdam University Press 2019) and the co-author (with Ivan Franceschini) of Global China as Method (Cambridge University Press 2022).

Teaching and Supervision

At Lund University I primarily teach and supervise at the Master's level. I convene the courses on research methodology at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies, which place a strong emphasis on systematic approaches to intervening in theoretical academic debates through primary empirical data collection and analysis. My methods courses include instruction on qualitative data analysis (QDA) software packages, including NVivo and Obsidian, and I am involved in publishing on and developing qualitative research methods and in-depth fieldwork approaches. I also teach and convene courses related to contemporary China, Chinese globalisation, theories of development, and Asian Studies more broadly. I supervise master's theses on a range of topics at the Centre and have previously supervised theses for the Lund University Master's in International Development (LUMID). As the director of PhD Studies at the Centre, I coordinate the PhD Programme in East and Southeast Asian Studies. I currently supervise three doctoral students (in Lund and Malmö) and two of my doctoral students have successfully completed their degrees (at the Australian National University and Lund).

Completed PhD students:

• Dr Xinjie Shi: 2016–2019 (Australian National University; 3rd supervisor)
• Dr Tabita Rosendal Ebbesen: 2020–2025 (Lund; 2nd supervisor)

Current PhD students:

• Kimhean Hok: 2022–2026 (Lund; 1st supervisor)
• Ning Ao: 2024–2028 (Lund; 1st supervisor)
• Enyam Joel Agbesinyale: 2024–2028 (Malmö; 3rd supervisor)

Academic Engagement, Event Organisation, and Service

I currently sit on the board of the Lund University Department of History and am a member of the group for Diversity, Equal Opportunities, and Gender Equality. At the University level I am on the Working Group for Open Science. In this role, over the past three years I have been involved in the planning and organisation of the Open Science Days events at Lund University, and more broadly I have been involved in the ethical open access movement. I am also a member of the Development Research Group and the Extractivism Research Network at the University, both of which organise events and workshops. At the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies I have been involved in organising large-scale events on a yearly basis, and I initiated the Perspective Asia Lecture Series. Internationally I am actively engaged in a number of academic associations and from 2018–2024 I was on the board of the European Association for Chinese Studies. I am currently an external examiner for East Asian Studies at the University of Leeds.

The Made in China Journal

Since 2016 I have been involved in editing the Made in China Journal and also engaged in the Journal's spin-off projects, including the People's Map of Global China and Global China Pulse. The Made in China Journal and associated projects are ethically open access initiatives aimed at bridging the gap between the scholarly community and the general public, and reappropriating academic research from commercial publishers who restrict the free circulation of ideas. Over the years these projects have published a large amount of research, both through the journals and in edited volumes, which now serve as a key knowledge foundation for the China Studies community, while also providing the broader public with accessible knowledge about developments related to China. These projects have also been the basis for a number of summer schools, first in Italy and later in Lund. In 2023 I organised and hosted the first 'Global China Summer School' at the Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies in Lund, and in 2025 I organised and hosted the second edition, with a focus on 'China in Circuits of Global Extractivism'. The summer schools have served to bring together established academics and an emerging cohort of scholars doing in-depth research on Chinese global engagements from a range of disciplines and perspectives.