Dr Joel Wing-Lun

Joel Wing-Lun is Lecturer in History and Asian Studies at UNSW. His research examines the social, economic and environmental impact of imperial expansion on communities in Southwest China from the seventeenth century to the present. His current book project traces the lives of a Miao family in Guizhou Province over three hundred years through documents written in their own hand. His recent publications include “Marriage, Mortality and Identity on China’s Miao Frontier, 1750-1919” in Modern China (2026), and “The Viral Success of Chinese Village Basketball” in Made in China Journal (2025). He is currently researching changing perceptions of the environment in the Qingshui River Basin during the Qing and Republican periods.

Joel holds a BA with honours in Chinese Studies from the University of Sydney and a PhD in History and East Asian Languages from Harvard University. He studied anthropology at Peking University and Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, was a graduate student associate at Harvard's Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and a visiting student at the Centre on China in the World at the Australian National University. He is the translator of The Chinese Empire in Local Society: Ming Military Institutions and Their Legacies (Routledge, 2020).

Joel was a visiting research associate at the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica, Taipei, in 2023. In 2025, he was a visiting scholar at the Advanced Institute for the Study of the Humanities at Sun Yat-sen University. He is an affiliated researcher at the Laureate Centre for History and Population at UNSW and a member of the University of Sydney China Studies Centre. He is also the English-language editor for the Hong Kong-based Journal of History and Anthropology.

Joel was the winner of the 2023 Arts, Design, and Architecture Early Career Academic Network Award for Teaching Excellence.