Position:
Teaching Associate
Contact:
mark.czeller@ames.ox.ac.uk; mark.czeller@york.ac.uk
Research Interests
I am an historian of twentieth-century China, with a focus on the political and social history of the Mao era. My doctoral research, completed at Oxford in 2022, investigated why people belonging to families labelled 'landlord' and 'rich peasant' during land reform (1946-52)—well over five percent of the population—continued to face stigma and mistreatment for three decades after they were dispossessed. I revised my thesis for publication as a monograph while a Past and Present Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research (University of London). My next project, which I have begun as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of York, looks at how and why some people tried to falsify or conceal their identities during the Mao era, and how the state built up its capacity to prevent them from doing so.
Education
DPhil in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, University of Oxford
MA in Advanced Chinese Studies, SOAS
BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, University of Oxford
Publications:
Non-People in the People’s Republic: Class Enemies in Maoist China (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press).
‘Between Civil Dispute and Political Crime: Property Rights and Practices of Denunciation in Maoist China’. The Journal of Chinese History, FirstView: 17 December 2025.
‘Filial Affection as Political Failing: The Children of Rural Class Enemies under the Maoist Emotional Regime.’ Modern China, Vol. 50, no. 1 (2024), 41-75.
‘Local Reassessment versus Central Prestige: Tao Zhu, Land Reform, and the Pine Hill Incident’. In Daniel Leese and Amanda Shuman (eds.), Justice after Mao: The Politics of Historical Truth in the People’s Republic of China (Cambridge University Press, 2023).
