Geremie Barmé


Geremie R. Barmé is an Australian sinologist, author, and film-maker on modern and traditional China. He was formerly Director, Australian Centre on China in the World and Chair Professor of Chinese History at Australian National University College of Asia and the Pacific in Canberra.
Barmé is known for his scholarship on modern Chinese cultural history, his writings as a public intellectual in newspapers and magazines, and his work in the documentary films. These include The Gate of Heavenly Peace, which depicted the spring on 1989 in China leading up to the events of June Fourth, and Morning Sun, on the Cultural Revolution. He is known as a non-native scholar who can research and write Chinese at the highest level.
His book An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai was awarded the Joseph Levenson Book Prize for Modern China, 2004. He was editor of the ANU based e-journal from 2005 to 2012, and is the editor of . In 2016, he founded in collaboration with sinologist John Minford.

Education and career

Barmé took his B.A. Asian Studies from ANU, majoring in Chinese and Sanskrit, then studied at universities in the People's Republic of China and Japan. When he first returned to Australia as a Lecturer in History, one of his first students was future Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, whose support was important in funding the Centre for China in the World.
He edited the journal East Asian History from 1991 to 2007 In 2011, he gave the inaugural "China in the World" Invited Lecture at ANU, "Australia and China in the World: Whose Literacy?"

New Sinology

In an essay first published in 2005, Barmé called for a "New Sinology," which would be
The historian Arif Dirlik is among those who welcomed Barmé’s intervention as "an important reminder of the importance of language as the defining feature of the term."

Selected major publications

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