Dr Yuexin Rachel Lin

Profile

My under- and postgraduate education was at the University of Oxford, where I completed a BA in Modern History and Politics, MPhil in Russian and East European Studies, and DPhil in History.

Prior to joining the University of Leeds, I was a British Academy postdoctoral fellow at the University of Exeter (2018–2021) and a postdoctoral researcher at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore (2016–2017). I have also held research and visiting fellowships with Sciences Po Paris and the German Historical Institute, Moscow.

Research interests

I am interested in the history of the Russo-Chinese borderlands, from Turkestan-Xinjiang in the west to Manchuria and Russia’s Pacific coast in the east. Among the themes I study are migration and cross-cultural exchange, imperial rivalries, nationalism, ethnicity and citizenship, and historical memory and public history. At the same time, I explore how developments along this frontier related to wider, international debates over law, governance, and identity.

My main research project focuses on the humanitarian crisis that emerged after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Russian refugees fled en masse into China, while Chinese migrants in Russia were caught up in the post-revolutionary Civil War. I examine how this crisis unfolded in the frontier region, and how it paralleled the evolution of international legal and humanitarian regimes for refugee relief and diaspora protection. Other topics I have worked and published on include the rise and fall of the Russo-Chinese “rublezone”, the legacies of the Russian Revolution in Asia, the conflict between Russia and China over shipping rights on the Amur River, and the activities of Chinese diaspora organisations during the Russian Civil War. In addition, I developed a joint project with the University of Geneva on Russo-Chinese frontier museums and their competing narratives of regional identity, bilateral history, and contemporary diplomacy.

Student education

As a tutor on the International History and Politics undergraduate programme, I teach modules dedicated to interwar diplomacy, decolonisation, and international Communism. I am also able to supervise postgraduate dissertations on modern Russian and East Asian history, refugeedom, heritage and museology, and Communism in Asia.

Research groups and institutes

• Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums
• Politics, Diplomacy, and International History
• Empires and Aftermath
• War Studies

Current postgraduate researchers

• Anqi Gao