Dr Samuel Cheney
Teaching and Research Fellow in Imperial and Global History
Contact details
- Email: samuel.cheney@ed.ac.uk
Address
- Street
-
Room G.218
Old Medical School (Doorway 3)
School of History, Classics, and Archaeology - City
- Post code
Availability
My drop in hours for students are:
Mondays 16:00 - 17:00; Thursdays 11:00 - 12:00.
Background
I studied for my first two degrees in History at the University of Oxford (2015 - 2018; 2018 - 2020). I then moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2020 to complete an AHRC-funded PhD in History, spending spring 2023 as a visiting graduate researcher at University of California, Los Angeles (Department of Ethnomusicology). Following nine-months on a Huayu Enrichment Scholarship at National Taiwan University, Taipei (2024 - 2025), I returned to Edinburgh in September 2025 as a Teaching and Research Fellow in Imperial and Global History.
Undergraduate teaching
Chinese Whispers: China in Western Minds from 1300
The White Man's Burden: Race, Gender, and the Victorian Empire
Historical Skills and Methods II
Introduction to Historiography (Pre-Honours)
Global Connections since 1450 (Pre-Honours)
Postgraduate teaching
Historical Methodology ("Music for Historians")
Research summary
I am a historian of the British empire and its relationship with China. In particular, I am interested in understanding Sino-British cultural interactions in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries from the perspective of music and sound. My research draws upon global music history, the history of the senses, and postcolonial studies to examine British interactions with music from China, and the contrasting roles and functions this music performed across the British imperial world.
“Exhausting the Ears: Aural Discomfort as Epistemological Disruption in British Travel Writing on China, c. 1860 – c. 1911,” The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 53, no. 4 (2025): 860 – 888.
“‘A Touch of the Real Chinese Character’: Hearing Race in Nineteenth-Century British Descriptions of Chinese Music,” in Routledge History of the Senses, Andrew Kettler and William Tullett, eds. (London: Routledge, 2025), 315 – 331.