Frank Dikötter is Chair Professor of Humanities at the University of Hong Kong (he is also Professor of the Modern History of China at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London). He is a key proponent of studying the history of China in global perspective and has published a series of innovative books, from his classic The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford, 1992) to the controversial Narcotic Culture: A History of Drugs in China (Chicago, 2004). He is currently based in Hong Kong and writing a book for Bloomsbury (UK) and Walker Books (US), based on a several thousand party archives from village, city, county and provincial collections on the famine of 1958 to 1962.
 
Frank Dikötter
 Current Research
 
 
Everyday Communism
 
 
 
 New Book in Print
 
 
China Cosmopolitan
 
 
 
 Past Research Projects
 
 
 
Material Culture in Modern China
 
 
Opium in the History of China
 
 
 Photo Albums
 
 
Modern Prisons in China
 
 
 
Material Culture as Photographed by Jack Birns
 
 
Towards a History of Photography in China
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
His books constitute a series of micro-studies which trace the contingent ways in which ideas, objects and institutions acquire global dimensions and are locally transformed in the specific case of modern China. In analysing topics such as gender, sexuality, 'race', eugenics, drugs, crime and punishment from a China-centered perspective based on extensive research on original primary sources, he has undermined many of the assumptions made in the humanities about the 'imposed' nature of the modern world, showing how elites and ordinary people alike were often keen to participate in key aspects of modernity and use them to suit their own perceived needs. These many acts of appropriation drive cultural diversification, even if the framework of reference is increasingly global. As a global community in the twenty-first century, we share a common world, although the ways in which this world is interpreted, inflected and shaped varies enormously from place to place: it is the emergence of this global community which is the focus of Frank Dikötter's work, including both the increased circulation of goods, ideas and people and the darker side of globalisation such as racism and sexism. His work also contributes to a number of longstanding debates about the making and breaking of individual freedoms, providing fresh historical perspectives from a non-European context on the incompatibility of racism with liberalism, the entrenched forms of discrimination against women and disabled people, the effects of state punishment in the form of the prison and the consequences of drug prohibition. His present research looks at the human consequences of forced collectivisation.