Lu Zhang will be visiting our Department of Cultures until next autumn! Lu Zhang is a PhD candidate in Art History at the University of Nottingham, the UK. Her research focuses on the history of collecting and exhibiting Chinese art outside China from the late 19th century till now, as well as the cultural diplomacy and art repatriation of the Chinese government in different historical periods. Coming from a hybrid background of Journalism and Art History, Lu has studied at Nanchang University in China (BA, 2010) in China, the School of Oriental and African Studies University of London (MA, 2011) in the UK, and Institut d’études supérieures des arts (MA, 2017) in Paris. She has work experience in media, art gallery, and academia as a journalist, editor, curator, and teacher.
In the academic year 2021-22, she worked as a teaching affiliate in the Department of Cultural, Media and Visual Studies of the UoN in Visual Culture of the Sixties: Culture & Counterculture (fall term) and Memory, Media and Visual Culture (spring term). At the same time, she was a research associate at the Digital Transformation Hub at the UoN, leading the Archaeology Slide Digitalisation Project. Lu is a winner of the UoN Asian Research Institute Postgraduate Research Award in 2022, which allowed her to conduct her archival research on the 1935 International Exhibition of Chinese Art at the Royal Academy of Arts London.