Dr Rana Mitter - THES Young Academic Author of the Year
Date
Share
Dr Rana Mitter (University Lecturer in the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College) has been named in the Times Higher Education Supplement Awards as Young Academic Author of the Year 2005 for his book, A Bitter Revolution: Chinas Struggle with the Modern World.
The book was also runner-up for the 2005 Longman/History Today Book of the Year and short listed for the British Academy Book Prize (2005). Ranas work examines contemporary China and discusses the role they are poised to play on the world stage. In A Bitter Revolution, Rana identifies May 4, 1919, as the defining moment of China`s twentieth-century history, marking their shift from pre-modern to modern world.
Jonathan Fenby, from the Financial Times, states In his impressive and inventively researched book, Rana Mitter uses the May Fourth movement as a theme around which to explore China`s bitter 20th century, with its repeated upheavals, foreign invasion and the death of more than 100 million people from man-made and natural disasters. He brings alive the promise felt by the intellectuals, journalists, writers and entrepreneurs who subscribed to the movement. In another review, Publishers Weekly states, A fascinating look at a pivotal time in the formation of the culture of modern China.... What is most intriguing about Mitters account is not what was lost in the dark decades that followed, but how much endured.
Rana has been a University Lecturer in the History and Politics of Modern China and Fellow of St Cross College since 2001. Some of his recent publications include:
`Old ghosts, new memories: China`s changing war history in the era of post-Mao politics`, Journal of Contemporary History. Vol 38, 1 (2003)
A Bitter Revolution: China`s Struggle with the Modern World. (Oxford, 2004)
(ed. with P Major), Across the Blocs: Cold War Cultural and Social History . (London, 2004)
`Imagining Manchuria: Press,Propaganda, and Northeast China in the Age of Empire` in Crossed Histories: New Approaches to Manchuria in the Age of Empire (ed. Mariko Asano Tamanoi), (Honolulu, 2005)
