Dr Anne Witchard

I have taught at the University of Westminster since 2006. I received my BA in English Literature at the University of North London (1997) and PhD in English Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London (2003). My key areas of teaching and research interest are in Gothic, the Fin de Siècle, and Modernism. My research interests centre on British and Chinese cultural relations. I received an AHRC Research Development Network Grant: Translating Cultures for the project China in Britain: Myths and Realities (2012-2014).

I am particularly interested in Sino-British cultural relations through the early-twentieth century. 

I have published books and articles that look at the historical formulations and effects of Orientalist stereotypes on cultural understandings of China and the Chinese in Britain. My books, British Modernism and Chinoiserie (EUP 2015) and England's Yellow Peril: Sinophobia and the Great War (Penguin 2015) assesses the impact of Chinatown, Chineseness and its mythologies on global modernism and transnational cultural affect.

My coedited book Chiang Yee and his Circle: Chinese Artistic and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1930–1950 is forthcoming (Autumn 2022) with HKUP

I am currently working on a book-length study Dancing Antic Hays: Performing Modernist Chineseries which considers the emergence of modernist dance/performance as a transnational art form that developed from encounters between East and West. 

PhD Supervision 

Aisling McKeown We’re All Irish Now? : migrancy and otherness in contemporary Irish literature 

Sanna Schyllert Sacrifice in Women’s Modernist Fiction

Johanna Kirby The poetry of ‘Michael Field’

Maria Ronchi The Life and Works of Henry Rider Haggard

Tessa Thorniley Penguin's China: Reading China in Paperback

For details of all my research outputs, visit my WestminsterResearch profile.