Robert Bickers

Robert A. Bickers (born 1964) is a British historian of modern China and colonialism.

He is currently a professor of history at the University of Bristol.

Bickers is the author of six books and editor or co-editor of three more.

Born in a Royal Air Force hospital in Wiltshire, UK, Bickers grew up living on Royal Air Force bases across England, in Germany, and in Hong Kong.

He studied Chinese language at SOAS University of London during the mid-1980s, including a year studying in Taiwan.

After holding fellowships in Oxford University and Cambridge University, Bickers joined the department of history at the University of Bristol in 1997, where he is currently a professor of history and associate pro vice-chancellor.

He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2023.

Empire Made Me: An Englishman Adrift in Shanghai (Allen Lane/Penguin and Columbia Univ. Press, 2003) was awarded the Morris D. Forkosch Prize of the American Historical Association.

Bickers directs the Hong Kong Kong History Project and the Historical Photographs of China digitization initiative.

He is the former co-director of the British Inter-university China Centre and the REACT Knowledge Exchange Hub and is currently associate pro vice-chancellor (PGR) at the University of Bristol.

Edited works:

Bickers' book Out of China was shortlisted for the 2018 Wolfson History Prize.

Rana Mitter in the New York Review of Books described it as "a panoramic examination of the increasingly powerful articulation of China's national identity in the twentieth century and the country's painful encounter with Western imperialism."