Dr David Pattinson

Profile

Originally from Melbourne, Australia, I joined East Asian Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at Leeds in 2000. 

I gained my PhD from the Australian National University in 1998; in my dissertation I studied letters and letter collections in seventeenth-century China, with a focus on the letter collections compiled by Zhou Lianggong (1612–1672). Before embarking on my PhD studies, I won an Australian Government scholarship to study in China between 1985 and 1988.

From 1992–1999 I worked in the Department of Translation at Lingnan University in Hong Kong, before moving to the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland in New Zealand.

Since coming to the UK, I have twice served on the council of the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS), including a term as Treasurer, and was the principal organiser of the BACS Annual Conference held here at Leeds in 2015.

As of November 2021, I serve on the Executive Council of the Universities’ China Committee in London (UCCL). 

Responsibilities

• Deputy Director, LCS Postgraduate Studies

Research interests

My current research project is about bees, beekeeping and the the cultural representation of bees in China up to approximately the end of the imperial period. In 2012 I published a short history of beekeeping in China in the journal Agricultural History, the first such history in English by a scholar who can read Chinese. More recently I contributed a chapter 'Bees in China: A Short Cultural History' in the book Animals through Chinese History (CUP, December 2018), and am now working towards a book-length study. In the longer term I am interested in the environmental history of China as represented in pre-modern literature.

I have also published on the collection of letters kept by the early Qing official, poet and calligrapher Yan Guangmin (1640–1686). This collection is significant as it is one of very few collections of letters to an individual, as distinct from the more numerous collections of letters by individuals, or anthologies of the letters of many people. 

I have writen on the social networks of a group of scholars and writers based in Ningdu and Nanfeng in south-eastern Jiangxi during the early Qing, focusing on Peng Shiwang (1610–1683), a minor writer, poet and Ming loyalist. I have also written on the Nanchang loyalist scholar Chen Hongxu (1597–1666) and his response to the violence and destruction of the Qing conquest. 

I am interested in supervising PhD research into letters and responses to upheaval in late imperial China (taken together or as separate topics), particularly in the late Ming and early Qing, and in topics in Environmental Humanities related to pre-modern China. I may also consider proposals for projects on the translation of pre-modern Chinese literature into English. 

Qualifications

• PhD Letter Collections in Early Qing China, Australian National University
• BA (Hons.) University of Melbourne

Professional memberships

• British Association for Chinese Studies
• Universities' China Committee in London

Student education

Currently I mainly teach pre-modern Chinese history and literature, including Classical Chinese, and a reading course in Republican period literature. I run a team-taught module called Global Environmental Humanities. I contribute to modules on East Asian religion and culture, and the broader pre-modern history of East Asia. I also supervise undergraduate final year dissertations and some Masters-level Chinese-English translation projects.

Research groups and institutes

• Chinese
• East Asian Studies
• Asia Pacific Studies
• History
• Literary studies
• Centre for World Literatures

Current postgraduate researchers

• Xiaodan Shan
• Kate Li
• Qian Su
• Xiaorong Cheng

Funding

<li><a href="//phd.leeds.ac.uk/funding/320-school-of-languages,-cultures-and-societies-studentship-award-for-excellence-2025/26">School of Languages, Cultures and Societies Studentship Award for Excellence 2025/26</a></li>