Dr Annabella Mei Massey

Annabella Mei Massey is the British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow (2024-2027). Her research focusses on visual and literary culture in post-reform China, with a particular emphasis on urban and rural environments. She received a BA in English Literature from the University of Warwick; an MPhil in Modern Chinese Studies from Wadham College, University of Oxford; and a Clarendon-funded DPhil in Chinese Studies from New College, University of Oxford. Her PhD thesis won the British Association of Chinese Studies’ “Best Doctoral Thesis Award” in 2023. Before joining the Courtauld, she was an Associate Lecturer at the IOE, University College London, where she taught courses on modern Chinese history and culture, and she also held the predoctoral position of Salvesen Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford.

Annabella is currently preparing her first monograph (provisionally titled The Edges of the City: The Generative Frontier in Contemporary Chinese Cinematic, Visual, and Literary Culture) for publication. This project explores the ways in which Chinese cities have been depicted as reparative frontier spaces of wildness and adventure by a diverse range of artists, filmmakers, and writers, including Jia Zhangke, Bi Gan, Yang Yongliang, Guo Xiaolu, Can Xue, and the Urban Exploration (chengshi tanxian) movement. Annabella’s second research project, supported by the British Academy and titled “Augmented Ruralism: the Techno-Pastoral Imagination in Contemporary Chinese Art”, explores visual and literary representations of a rural China enhanced by real or speculative new technologies. Here, she traces the emergence of an aesthetic genre she calls “augmented ruralism”, a vision of the 21st-century Chinese countryside which has been rendered more authentic, efficient, or futuristic through technological innovation.