Dr Monique Taylor will join our Chinese Studies as a senior researcher in the Department of Cultures at the University of Helsinki in August. 

Dr Taylor is currently research affiliate at the Lau China Institute, King’s College London. Previously, she was maailmanpolitiikan yliopistonlehtori (UK/Aus senior lecturer in world politics) at the University of Helsinki where she also served on the Global Politics and Communication Program steering committee, postdoctoral fellow in Public Policy and Global Affairs at Nanyang Technological University, research fellow at the National University of Singapore, and lecturer in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland. 

Monique specialises in political economy and international relations. She has a long-standing interest in China’s political economy, focusing on state capitalism and the political economy of state-owned enterprises, through empirical examination of strategic sectors such as the oil industry and the ICT sector. In other work she has explored digital authoritarianism, the geopolitics of technology, and aspects of regionalism and global governance. From 2023-2025, she will be working on a Horizon Europe Twinning project called ‘The EU in the Volatile Indo-Pacific Region’ (EUVIP), in partnership with Palacký University in Olomouc, Czech Republic. 

Monique’s research has been published by academic books presses and in a range of leading international scholarly journals and edited volumes. Notably, her first book titled The Chinese State, Oil and Energy Security was published by Palgrave Macmillan’s International Political Economy series in 2014. Monique’s latest book, published by Palgrave Macmillan, China’s Digital Authoritarianism: A Governance Perspective, is out now. In addition, she is a member of the editorial board for the Journal of Current Chinese Affairs.