Dr Helena F.S. Lopes

Associate Member

helena.lopes@history.ox.ac.uk

I am a historian of modern China and its interactions with the world. My research has focused on the history of the Second World War in East Asia and of imperialism(s) in China, but I am also interested in histories of Chinese migration and of the Portuguese community in China, as well as in Sinophone cinema. My research explores overlooked global encounters and connections whose ambiguities and complexities challenge conventional narratives of neutrality, collaboration, and imperialism.

I hold a DPhil in History from St Antony’s College, Oxford, and two MA degrees (in Chinese Studies and in Historical Research Methods) from SOAS, University of London. I was a Departmental Lecturer in Modern East Asian History at the Faculty of History and Merton College from 2017 to 2019. I am one of the founding convenors of the International History of East Asia Seminar, which is held at the Oxford China Centre since 2016. I joined the interdisciplinary research network Colonial Ports and Global History at TORCH in 2019.

Research

I am writing a monograph on neutrality, collaboration, and global encounters in the South China enclave of Macau during the Second World War in East Asia (1937-1945) and the immediate post-war period. Macau, the first and last European colonial settlement in China, was the only foreign-administered territory to remain unoccupied by Japan throughout the war. Through a variety of previously unused multilingual sources collected in various countries I explore Chinese wartime diplomacy, uses and abuses of neutrality, and experiences of transnational collaboration.

I have published on the history of the Red Cross in Macau and on Portuguese Eurasian POWs in Hong Kong and Japan during the Second World War. I have also conducted research on the relocation of schools from China to Macau, on representations of World War Two in Chinese cinema, and I am currently starting a comparative study of Macau and Hong Kong’s responses to the wartime refugee crisis.

Teaching

Publications

Prelims:	FHS:	Masters:
Approaches to History	China since 1900	History and Historiography of Modern China
	The Global Twentieth Century, 1930-2003
	Imperial and Global History, 1750-1930
	Disciplines of History