Joel Wing-Lun is Lecturer in History and Asian Studies at UNSW. His research uses fieldwork and village documents to examine the social, economic and environmental impact of imperial expansion on communities in Southwest China from the seventeenth through the twentieth century. He is currently researching land markets and marriage practices in Guizhou Province during the Qing (1644-1911) and the early Republican period.

Joel holds a BA with honours in Chinese Studies from the University of Sydney and a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. He was a visiting research student at Peking University, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, and the Australian National University. He is the translator of The Chinese Empire in Local Society: Ming Military Institutions and Their Legacies (Routledge, 2020).

He is an affiliated researcher at the Laureate Centre for History and Population at UNSW and a member of the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney. In 2023, he was a visiting research associate at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei.

Joel was the winner of the 2023 Arts, Design, and Architecture Early Career Academic Network Award for Teaching Excellence.