Dr Minerva Inwald

I am a historian of modern China. My interdisciplinary research combines historical and art historical methodologies to explore the cultural and social history of twentieth and twenty-first century China.

I am currently working on a book project, tentatively titled Experts and Amateurs: Artistic Practice and the Socialist Class Imagination in Mao’s China, which offers a new historical account of class politics in the Mao era from the previously unexamined vantage point of the visual arts profession—a crucial sector of state-sponsored cultural production and propaganda work in socialist China. My research on cultural policy in the Mao era has been published in the journal Modern China (Inwald, M. (2023). "The Aesthetic Needs of the Masses: Cultural Work in the Aftermath of the Great Leap Forward." Modern China, 49 (3), 290-319. https://doi.org/10.1177/00977004221132155). In 2016 I co-authored the book Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954–2002 (Sydney: Power Publications, 2016), the first comprehensive study of Chinese modern and contemporary prints held in the University of Sydney Art Collection. My writing on Chinese contemporary art has been published in Art Monthly Australasia. 

At UNSW I teach the course "East Asian Contemporary Art" in the School of Art & Design, which explores how twentieth and twenty-first century visual art practice in China, Japan and South Korea has been shaped by histories of imperialism, colonialism, socialism, authoritarianism and democratisation in the region.

I have curated exhibitions related to Chinese contemporary art, including Provocations: Avant-Garde Art in China in the 1980s (Fisher Library, The University of Sydney, 2017) and Floating Time: Chinese Prints, 1954–2002 (University Art Gallery, The University of Sydney, 2016).