Michel Hockx

Professor Hockx is Professor of Chinese at SOAS, University of London. He obtained his PhD in 1994 from Leiden University, The Netherlands, for a thesis on modern Chinese poetry. He has since gone on to do research in the area of sociology of literature, with particular reference to modern Chinese literary communities, their practices and their publications.

His 2003 monograph Questions of Style (Leiden: Brill) is a study of literary societies and literary journals from the Republican period. In the book, he introduces an analytical approach towards studying literary journals which he calls "horizontal reading".

His contribution to the current project lies in the further development of the "horizontal reading" approach in the specific context of the study of the early modern Chinese popular press.