Dr Isabella Jackson (she/her)

Assistant Professor in Chinese History

Research Interests

I have worked at Trinity since 2015, after lecturing at the Universities of Aberdeen and Oxford. I research modern Chinese history, including the colonial history of the treaty ports, which were opened to foreign traders by force in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of Chinese childhood and the history of breastfeeding and infant feeding in China. I was Principal Investigator on Irish Research Council Laureate Grant CHINACHILD: Slave-girls and the Discovery of Female Childhood in Twentieth-century China (2018-24). Together with a team of researchers, I explored how controversies over keeping unpaid domestic servants (binü 婢女 or mui tsai) reflected changing and expanding conceptions of Chinese childhood.

Select Publications
Books

• Shaping Modern Shanghai: Colonialism in China’s Global City (Cambridge University Press, 2018; paperback 2019)
• Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History, ed., with Yushu Geng (Routledge, 2025)
• Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power, ed. with Robert Bickers (Routledge, 2016; paperback 2018)

Articles and Book chapters

• '“My father sold me as a maid”: When binü (婢女, 'Maidservants' or 'Slave-girls') spoke up in Republican China', in I. Jackson and Y. Geng (eds), Rethinking Childhood in Modern Chinese History (Routledge, 2025), 199-214
• (with Siyi Du) “The Impact of History Textbooks on Young Chinese People’s Understanding of the Past: A Social Media Analysis.” Journal of Current Chinese Affairs, 51:2 (2022), 194-218. https://doi.org/10.1177/18681026221105525
• ‘The Shanghai Scottish: Scottish, Imperial and Local Identities, 1914-41’ in T. M. Devine and Angela McCarthy (eds), The Scottish Experience in Asia, c.1700 to the Present: Settlers and Sojourners (Palgrave Macmillan Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies series, 2017), pp. 235-57
• ‘Habitability in the Treaty Ports: Shanghai and Tianjin’, in Toby Lincoln and Xu Tao (eds), The Habitable City in China: Urban History in the Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), pp. 169-91
• ‘Who ran the treaty ports? A study of the Shanghai Municipal Council’, in Robert Bickers and Isabella Jackson (eds), Treaty Ports in Modern China: Law, Land and Power (Routledge, 2016), pp. 43-60
• ‘Expansion and Defence in the International Settlement at Shanghai’, in Robert Bickers and Jonathan Howlett, eds, Britain and China, 1840-1970: Empire, Finance and War (Routledge, 2015), pp. 187-204
• ‘Chinese Colonial History in Comparative Perspective’, Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 15:3 (2014)
• ‘The Raj on Nanjing Road: Sikh Policemen in Treaty-Port Shanghai’, Modern Asian Studies, 46:2 (2012), 1672-1704. Translated into Chinese: 南京路上的影印统治：条约口岸上海的锡克巡捕 Nanjing Lu shang de Ying-Yin tongzhi: tiaoyue kou'an Shanghai de Xike xunbu, 上海史国际论丛 Shanghai shi guoji luncong (International Review of Shanghai History), No. 2 (2015), 63-92

Teaching and Supervision

I teach undergraduate and MPhil modules on Imperialism and Decolonisation in East Asia, Cities of Empire, Twentieth-century China, the Global History of Childhood, and Chinese Childhood. I supervise UG and MPhil dissertations on Asian and imperial history.

I am supervising PhD students working on:

• Performing and Policing Prostitution: Race, Sexuality and the Problem of Slavery under the Contagious Diseases Ordinances in Colonial Hong Kong (Ezra Kücken)
• Floating Sight: Visual Rhetoric in Chinese Urban Photography, 1843-1937 (Yuxuan Lang)
• Maritime Piracy and British Shipping in Hong Kong, 1900-1945 (Dexter Ho Nam Tse)

My PhD graduates have gone on to successful academic posts including:

• Yau Ka Lo, Assistant Lecturer, School of Chinese Studies, University of Hong Kong. PhD Thesis title: Negotiating Modern Childhood: A Social History of Children in Republican China (1912-1949)
• Zhang Meishan, Co-Director of Asian & Irish Community Connect, Dublin, former PI of Irish Research Council Enterprise Partnership Scheme with Crosscare Migrant Project and Maynooth University. Thesis title: Media and Medical Equipment in the Republican Shanghai, 1912-1949.
• Du Siyi, Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow 2024-2025, Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. Thesis title: Changing Representations of the Republic of China, 1912-1915 and 1940-1945: An Analysis of Chinese Public History Practice.
• Clare Morrison, Lecturer, American College Dublin. Thesis title: Identity and Irishmen in the Chinese Customs Service.

I welcome approaches from potential research students with a strong academic background in history who are interested in working on Chinese childhood in modern history, colonialism in China or the interaction of western and Chinese people, politics, culture, and society in the nineteenth and/or twentieth centuries.

Dr. Jackson on the TCD Research Support System

Contact Details

Room 3120
Department of History
Trinity College
Dublin 2
Telephone: +353 1 896 3166
Fax: +353 1 896 3995
Email: isabella.jackson @ tcd.ie