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Dr. Patricia Thornton

Director of Contemporary China Studies Programme and

University Lecturer in the Politics of China, Oxford School of Global and Area Studies,

Tutor and Fellow, Merton College

thornton

Dr Patricia M. Thornton is a political scientist whose research interests span the political, socio-economic, and cultural history of modern China. She received her Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and previously taught at a private liberal arts college in the US before serving as the Director of the Institute for Asian Studies at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon. She joined the Department of Politics and International Relations and the Contemporary China Studies Programme as a University Lecturer in the Politics of China in 2008. She is a Fellow of Merton College.

She is the Acting Chief Editor of The China Quarterly. She previously served (in 2016) as one of the co-editors (along with Chris Berry and Sun Peidong) of a special issue marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Cultural Revolution;  She is also the editor of a special issue that will be released later this month on the CCP Centenary, entitled The CCP at 100: The Party's New Long March. She has been invited to speak on the podcast, Pekinology, about her article in the special issue (on democratic centralism); and on 11 November, on The Little Red Podcast on the subject of the upcoming Sixth Plenum.

Email: patricia.thornton@politics.ox.ac.uk