Dr Gordon Barrett

Focusing on the middle of the twentieth century, Dr Gordon Barrett's research on the histories of Sino-foreign scientific exchange and Sino-British scientific networks has intersected with Oxford in a number of ways. On the British side of these relationships, he has explored the international activities, networks, and internationalist agendas of Oxford-based scientists such as Dorothy Hodgkin and Kurt Mendelssohn, considering how these have helped to shape their relationship with science and scientific colleagues in China.

Both Hodgkin and Mendelssohn feature in Dr Barrett's forthcoming monograph on China’s evolving relationship with international science in the Cold War. So, too, does Hodgkin’s good friend Liao Hongying, a political activist and agricultural chemist who studied at Somerville College, who during the Second Sino-Japanese War also went on to work for the British Council-funded Sino-British Science Co-operation Office headed by Joseph and Dorothy Needham. Dorothy Hodgkin’s time in Ghana after independence, as well as her connections to the country’s scientific community and to Kwame Nkrumah’s government also feature in a chapter Dr Barrett contributed to the edited collection Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy, which examines activist scientists’ efforts to re-establish connections between the Pugwash movement and China between 1960 and 1985. (https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004340176_007)

Dr Barrett has also contributed to the Oxford and Empire Project’s ‘blue plaque’ initiative, contributing a plaque to commemorate Shen Fuzong’s (c. 1658-1691) time in Oxford and his vital role in cataloguing the Bodleian’s collection of Chinese-language material. (https://oxfordandempire.web.ox.ac.uk/article/chen-fu-zong-shen-fuzong-c-1658-1691)