DrSophie Loy-Wilson

Project Opportunities

Title: Chinese Australian history

Summary of opportunity:

I am a historian of Chinese Australian communities. My first book was a study of China-Australia relations in the interwar years, seen through the prism of Chinese Australian communities in Shanghai. In the book, I highlighted the importance of economic archives for immigration historians; these archives often preserve migrant agency. I combine methodological insights from labour history, overseas Chinese history, and the New History of Capitalism to bring a ‘New Materialist’ approach to Australia’s multi-ethnic and multi-lingual past.

Opportunity synopsis:

Research interests

• Chinese Australian history
• Labour History
• Histories of Migration
• The history of Sino-Australian relations
• New History of Capitalism
• Overseas Chinese Diaspora

I specialise in Chinese Australian history, but I am also happy to supervise topics in Australian history more generally, particularly labour history, social history and immigration history.

----------Current Research Projects----------

The Chinese Australian Ghost Economy Project (ARC DECRA 2022-2025)

This project aims to uncover the social and cultural significance of Chinese economic activity in Australia. Court archives will be used to investigate Chinese agricultural and remittance economies, re-centering Chinese Australians in the nation's history. I propose that behind the surveillance archive of White Australia was a partially hidden world of Chinese Australian social, political and economic activity, a 'ghost' or 'shadow' economy, which operated at a necessary remove from the state. Chinese migrants built their own economic institutions in Australia; share farming allowed for labour mobility, intricate banking and remittance systems based upon kinship obligations and debt bondage helped create vast and reliable distribution network. Legal historians have long been convinced that state power over, for example, immigration policy, mattered to economic change. In this project I will collaborate with legal and economic historians to address a key question: how did Chinese migrant communities survive economically and socially in white Australia?

South Flows the Pearl: Chinese Australian Voices

Since 2019 I have been collaborating with the family of Chinese Australian historian Mavis Gock Yen to publish and preserve the oral histories she collected with her community in the 1980s and 1990s but never published. Working with the Chinese Australian Historical Society and Sydney University Press, we published Mavis's ground breaking work in 2022 as South Flows the Pearl: Chinese Australian Voices (Sydney: University of Sydney Press, 2022).