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). Since a half-year period of residence in Taiwan in 2023, she has contributed a number of public interest articles on gender and politics in Taiwan to online journals (The Conversation, Inside Story) and is continuing to read widely in this area. Her current research otherwise focuses on ethnicity and family formation in the Chinese community in between-the wars Perth, a project that builds on her existing published work, academic and general.