Dr Brian Spivey

I am a historian of modern China and current postdoctoral fellow at the Australian Centre on China in the World. I hold a PhD in History from the University of California, Irvine (2023) and an MA in Asian Studies from Georgetown University.

My research focuses on the environmental, social, and technological dimensions of China’s ambitious and uneven industrialization across the twentieth century. I also write about ethnopolitics in China's borderland regions, especially the Uyghur region. 

I have written about the history of China’s former largest copper mining city (Baiyin), ethnopolitics and social movements in Xinjiang during the post-Mao 1980s, as well as the history of the circular production, industrial chemistry, pollution, and socialist environmentalism.

My book project, “Pollution Revolution: Maoism, Environmentalism, and the Consequences of Industrialization in Modern China” investigates the intersection of the global rise in awareness of environmental degradation in the 1960s-70s and the revolutionary project to remake society under the leadership of Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976).

Outside the academy, I am co-editor of China book reviews for The Los Angeles Review of Books.