Robert Bickers


Robert A. Bickers is a British historian of modern China and colonialism. He is currently a Professor of History at the University of Bristol. Bickers is the author of five books and editor/co-editor of three more. A sixth book, China Bound: John Swire & Sons and its World, a history of the British company John Swire & Sons, will be published by Bloomsbury in March 2020.

Biography

Born in a Royal Air Force hospital in Wiltshire, UK, Bickers grew up living on Royal Air Force bases across England, in Germany, and in Hong Kong. He studied Chinese language at SOAS University of London during the mid 1980s, including a year studying at the Beijing Language Institute in China. In 1997 Bickers joined the Department of History at the University of Bristol, where he is a Professor of History and Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor.

Scholarship

Bickers' most recent book, Out of China, was shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson History Prize. Rana Mitter in the New York Review of Books described it as "a panoramic examination of the increasingly powerful articulation of China's national identity in the twentieth century and the country's painful encounter with Western imperialism." Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai was awarded the Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association.
Bickers directs the Hong Kong Kong History Project and the Historical Photographs of China digitization initiative.. He is the former co-director of the British Inter-university China Centre and the REACT Knowledge Exchange Hub and is currently Associate Pro Vice-Chancellor at the University of Bristol.

Published works

Edited works: