In this blog post we hear from Dr Sijie Ren about their prize-winning thesis!

I’m delighted to share some good news: my PhD thesis, “Science and Politics in Maoist China: The Synthetic Insulin Project and its Legacy,” has been awarded the 2025 Best Doctoral Thesis Prize by the British Association for Chinese Studies (BACS). The announcement at the annual conference of the BACS in Leicester on 5 September was a generous honour, and I’m deeply grateful to my supervisors, Professor Robert Bickers and Dr Adrian Howkins, and to colleagues in Bristol’s Department of History for their steady encouragement.

My research grows from a simple question that has big consequences: what political conditions help, or hinder, basic science? We often talk about breakthroughs as if they happen in a sealed laboratory, but the day-to-day reality of science is entangled with funding rules, personnel decisions, procurement, and shifting priorities. I wanted to see, at close range, how those forces shaped one landmark achievement in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and how the meaning of that achievement was built up over time.

I follow what is arguably the most important basic-science achievement in the history of the PRC, the synthetic insulin project, completed in the mid-1960s. Rather than retelling a heroic lab story, I reconstruct the project from start to finish and then trace how its meaning was shaped afterwards. That means asking not only how the chemistry worked, but also how decisions were made, how time and resources were protected, and how the result was presented to the public.

What emerges is a picture that’s both hopeful and realistic. Campaign-style drives—more people, faster deadlines, louder slogans—did not speed complex experiments. Progress came when mid-level administrators and senior scientists did quieter work: buffering core teams from political noise, smoothing supply chains, and giving specialists room to solve stubborn problems. In other words, the success of basic science depended less on grand declarations and more on creating small islands of continuity inside a turbulent system. That balance—between political ambition and laboratory reality—turned out to be decisive.

Once the result was in hand, another process began. Conferences, media coverage, museum displays and textbooks helped fix how the achievement would be read. The way a result is framed—what counts as definitive, who gets credit, what lesson is drawn—shapes its authority and afterlife. Synthetic insulin became a durable symbol of national capability and modernity, not simply because the chemistry worked, but because institutions told a clear story about what it meant.

To reconstruct this, I used a wide range of sources: internal publications from research institutes, journals and conference records, newspapers and newsreels, institutional gazetteers, memoirs, interviews, and site visits in Shanghai and Beijing.

What I find is a picture in which technical excellence is necessary but not sufficient. Whether a result becomes credible, exemplary, and nationally meaningful depends on the political architecture around it: who can shield long experiments from political turbulence, how merit is recognised, how resources are rationed, and how the story is told afterwards. That observation is hardly unique to Mao-era China. States everywhere try to turn basic research into public value, and in doing so they influence what counts as convincing evidence, how risk is judged, and who is believed when disagreements arise. The insulin case gives these dynamics historical texture.

Winning the BACS prize is an honour, but the real reward has been the chance to look closely at how science gains authority—and how fragile that authority can be without thoughtful stewardship. I’m thankful to the Universities’ China Committee in London and to the University of Bristol’s Department of History for supporting the work, and to the archivists, interviewees and colleagues who helped along the way. If any of this sparks questions or curiosity, I’d be glad to continue the conversation.

If you’d like to get in touch about this research, you can contact Sijie on: ch20082@bristol.ac.uk

In this blog post, we hear from Hannah Clark, who has just finished the second year of her history degree at the University of Bristol and completed this internship on British South Asian History over the summer.

Over the last six weeks, I contributed to the development of a public digital resource titled ‘South Asian Britain: Connections and Networks’ – you can find out more about this here. I worked alongside Professor Sumita Mukherjee, one of the University of Bristol’s historians that have led the project ‘Remaking Britain: South Asian Connections and Networks, 1830s to the present.’ To mark South Asian Heritage month (18 July – 17 August), the website was launched this July. This resource caters both to the wider public and to individuals conducting academic research. It consists predominantly of entries and oral histories on people, organisations and events related to the interconnected experiences of South Asians in Britain. This opportunity was facilitated by the Widening Participation Research Summer Internship Programme.

During my internship, I engaged with a range of research methods and gained experience completing different types of tasks that a project like this requires. My first week was spent familiarising myself with the topic, and in my second week I helped with website editing, either captioning photographs or fixing inaccurate map pins on certain entries. In my third week, I got the opportunity to conduct archival research for the first time, spending three days in the Arts and Social Science’s Special Collections. I specifically looked at records on M.G.K. Menon, a physicist who received his PhD from the University of Bristol, and on the first British South Asian Members of Parliament. I found this process fascinating, and I was able to apply my research on Menon when I later wrote his entry for the website.

The second half of my internship was spent writing entries on different people. I particularly enjoyed this task, and it has further improved the way I process resources, preparing me more to take on a dissertation this academic year. What I appreciated most was the process of going from reading an individual’s name for the first time, to piecing together my best attempt at an overview of their life; it was extremely interesting, and at times quite moving. For example, though I only found limited information on her, I wrote about the UK’s first female Sikh and South Asian police officer, PC Karpal Kaur Sandhu. Her story is tragic, as she was murdered at 30 by her husband, who deemed her profession unsuitable for a woman. Her story is also groundbreaking and inspiring, and she left a legacy that has motivated subsequent generations of female police officers. Being able to shed light on individuals that have broken down barriers in society, like PC Sandhu, is one of the many reasons that public history projects like Remaking Britain are so beautiful and so important.

This internship gave me the opportunity to see what goes on behind the scenes of a research project. One can easily take a website like this for granted, without considering the number of contributors and the amount of effort it requires to complete. This experience has helped me to develop my own research abilities and has taught me so much about this topic and its significance. I am so grateful to have been supervised by Professor Mukherjee, with whom I had weekly meetings and continuous support with every aspect of my internship. I wholeheartedly urge anyone intrigued by academic research to apply to this programme in the future!

Almost twenty-two years after Concorde completed its final commercial flight to Bristol in 2003, a US-made prototype jet, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1, has successfully broken the sound barrier. As a historian of industry, politics and technology in Britain and the wider world, Dr Keith Mc Loughlin considers the significance of the achievement, the challenges facing supersonic transport and the historical lessons to be learnt if it is to succeed…

To read more from Keith on Concorde, check out the original Arts Matter blog post!

In this blog post, Bristol lecturer Shaun Wallace reflects on his forthcoming book In Pursuit of Freedom: Fugitive Slaves and Advertised Escape in the Early Republic.

Explaining the origins and motivations behind my first manuscript I find myself gravitating toward the same inspiration I accredit to my decision to study and teach American slavery—the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (1845). As a second year student at the University of Stirling in 2008, my introduction to racial slavery was through Douglass’s eloquent and powerful antebellum autobiography. I was drawn to its themes of agency and resistance and to the life of Douglass, the self-taught author who learned to read and write and used his literateness to challenge, and eventually escape, the system that enslaved him. I analysed literateness within narrative accounts of enslavement written by formerly enslaved people for my undergraduate dissertation, explored the relationship between literacy and escape for my MRes thesis, and resistance as captured in fugitive slave advertisements for my PhD project.

Yet, for every question answered, another seemed to appear. How did bondpersons pursuit of literacy fuse with their understanding of freedom? What other motivations led enslaved persons to escape? Douglass was Maryland’s most famous fugitive but who were the others—The women, men, and children who never left written testimonies but were advertised as escapees by enslavers? How did demographic, geographical, and temporal factors shape fugitivity patterns—Did bondpersons who escaped from the Chesapeake region in the upper South share the same profile as escapees from slavery in the deeper South?I designed the Fugitive Slave Database (FSdb) to address these questions. One of the largest digital archives of American fugitive slave advertisements from the turn of the nineteenth century, I built it to preserve fugitivity notices in their complete and original form, bring them into a corpus of historical evidence, and create datasets for analysis. A total of 5,567 fugitivity notices published in Georgia and Maryland (and smaller samples from South Carolina and Virginia) were collected and over 9,000 records extrapolated from them, generating new and original information for 2,350 enslaved women, men, and children advertised as escapees by some 2,000 men and women who enslaved them.

My forthcoming manuscript, In Pursuit of Freedom: Fugitive Slaves and Advertised Escape in the Early Republic (publication with the University of Georgia Press: early 2025) centres around the experiences of the enslaved women and men captured in fugitive slave advertisements, emerging as a major contribution to historiographical understandings of slavery in the United States from the turn of the nineteenth century.

Directing attention to a time (the early republic) and to places (Georgia and Maryland) that have not received sustained consideration by scholars of enslaved fugitivity, my book enriches scholarly understanding of the methods adopted by enslavers when enslaved men and women escaped, providing new insights into the attitude of enslavers as well as the role of printers and print in the surveillance of Black bodies.  In Pursuit of Freedom furnishes scholarship with first empirically-based profile of fugitives and fugitivity in Georgia and Maryland at the turn of the nineteenth century. It deploys quantitative and qualitative methods to unearth the stories that enslaved women and men did not write themselves but that can be recovered, reconstructed, and reimagined through careful attention to a vast archive of fugitive slave advertisements that became a standard feature of American newspapers during the eighteenth century.

My new book encourages slavery scholars to interpret fugitive slave advertisements in new and original ways. Pioneering innovative digital humanities methodologies to conceptualize and theorize bondpersons pursuit of freedom as a lifelong struggle, it sheds light on a profoundly personal process of becoming and self-actualization in the lives of enslaved women and men as they distanced themselves physically and psychologically from bondage. Fugitivity, the book argues, marked an important, if uncertain stride, in what has been until now a fugitive process—Not the end but rather a moment in the lives of freedom seekers alluded to in fugitive slave advertisements. Interpreting notices for escapees for what they were truly were—the desperate actions of enslavers to interfere and meddle in a process they could never control—we can ensure that the agency, decision-making, and personhood of the women and men in pursuit of freedom is never again generalized, masked, silenced, or undermined.