Antonia Finnane

Biography

Antonia Finnane is honorary professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne. A graduate of the University of Sydney (BA Hons 1974) and the Australian National University (PhD 1985), she also spent time as a student at the Beijing Language Institute and Nanjing University (1976-7). She was employed in teaching and research at the University of Melbourne 1985-2018 inclusive, except for an intervening period in Beijing, where she taught at the Ricci Institute for Chinese studies and in the Yale-PKU joint undergraduate program （2009-2011). She has broad interests in social and cultural history and particular expertise in material and technological change in twentieth-century China. She is the author of Far From Where? Jewish Journeys from Shanghai to Australia (Melbourne University Press 1999); Speaking of Yangzhou: A Chinese City, 1550-1850 (Harvard University East Asia Series, 2004), winner of the 2006 Levenson Prize; Changing Clothes in China: Fashion, History, Nation (Columbia University Press 2008) and How to Make a Mao Suit: Clothing the People of Communist China, 1949-1976 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her current research focuses on ethnicity and family formation in the Chinese community in between-the wars Perth.