The Jewish Museum of Florida-FIU invites you to its upcoming lecture Jews and China: Dr. Xun Zhou. 

In this talk Dr. Xun Zhou will present an overview of global history of Chinese and Jewish encounters, from the early Sino-Middle Eastern-European interactions and through missionary and colonial endeavors in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century, and then to China and Israel’s relationship in the late 20th and 21s century. It situates China and the Jews in global and national historical narratives as imagined spaces and communities and as models of and space for nationalistic as well as revolutionary projects.

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Dr. Xun Zhou is the reader in History at the University of Essex. She is now one of Europe’s most productive historians working at the boundaries of health, medicine, science, religion, and everyday life in modern China. She also has a track record in trans-cultural/global studies. Her research interests range from the political history of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to medicine, health intervention and delivery in the PRC, nutrition, food and narcotics as well as questions of race and ethnicity in modern China. She has authored and a number of ground-breaking books, including Chinese Perceptions of the ‘Jew’ and Judaism (2001; pb 2015) and Narcotic Culture: a History of Drugs in China (2004; pb 2016). Her co-authored new book 'I Know Who Caused COVID-19': Pandemics and Xenophobia (2021) with Sander Gilman is a timely, cogent examination of blame and xenophobia, which have been brought to the surface by the COVID-19 pandemic. For 2021 and 2022, she was awarded the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin fellowship, one of Europe’s most prestigious fellowships. Since 2021, she has been elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in the UK in recognition of her contribution to historical scholarship.

Xun has also a long track record in media activities. Between 2012 and 13, she wrote a regular Op-Ed column for the South China Morning Post, the most important English-language newspaper in Hong Kong. In the beginning of the Covid pandemic in 2020, She was regularly interviewed by major news media such as the New York Times and the BBC to comment on the Covid-19 crisis in China.