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Professor Julia C Strauss is a distinguished scholar of Chinese politics at the Department of Politics and International Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Promoted to Professor in 2013, she previously served as Editor of The China Quarterly from 2002-2011. Her academic career at SOAS began in 1994, establishing her as a leading expert on Chinese political development.
Her educational background includes a BA in Chinese Language and European History from Connecticut College (1983) and both an MA and PhD from the Department of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley (1984, 1991).
Professor Strauss's research spans both sides of the Taiwan Straits with a focus on state building, institution building, governance, political performance, environmental politics, and China's "going out" policy toward developing regions, particularly Africa and Latin America. Her work uniquely bridges historical analysis with contemporary political developments, examining how political institutions evolve through campaigns, bureaucratic practices, and performative dimensions of governance. She approaches Chinese politics through comparative frameworks that extend beyond East Asia.
Her extensive publication record reveals consistent engagement with themes of state capacity, political transformation, and cross-regional connections. Recent work shows increasing attention to China's global engagements while maintaining deep historical analysis of Chinese state formation. She frequently examines how political rhetoric intersects with practical governance across different historical periods.
Professor Strauss has supervised PhD students including Leon Nelson Kunz, Hang Zhou, and Lingxia Zhou, whose research explores deliberative democracy in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Chinese development engagement in Africa, and language policy in multilingual China respectively. She is currently working on a monograph titled "Security, Land and Rice: Trajectories of Regime Consolidation in China and Taiwan, 1949-1955."
