Departmental homepageProfessor McMullen first learned Chinese on RAF National Service, deployed in intelligence in Hong Kong. He then read Chinese as an undergraduate at St John's (1959-62) before being elected to a Fellowship in Oriental Studies. He became Assistant Lecturer and Lecturer, specialising in medieval Chinese history. He was elected Professor of Chinese in 1988, a post he held until his retirement in 2006. In retirement, he has continued to teach, lecture and publish research.
At Cambridge, he taught undergraduates and graduates for several decades in Chinese history and Classical Chinese at the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies (formerly the Faculty of Oriental Studies). He has also held distinguished visiting posts at Peking University, Academic Sinica in Taiwan and CUHK (among others).
In retirement, he continues to give lectures and seminar papers in Cambridge, China, Taiwan, the USA and Europe, and he has devoted his time to productive academic research, publishing a number of works in leading international journals and participating in international workshops and conferences, as well as engaging fully in college life at St John's. In his mid-80s, he continues to spend his time actively working on primary research.
Professor McMullen writes on the political, institutional, religious and literary history of the Tang dynasty in China (618-907 CE). His work furthers our understanding of the sophisticated bureaucratic state and flourishing culture of this period, China's so-called 'Golden Age'. He is currently completing a full-length monograph on the poet Du Fu, situating him in his historical context, and has two more research articles in draft.
State and Scholars in T'ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 423 pp.
"The Role of the Zhouli in Seventh and Eighth-Century Civil Administrative Traditions" in Benjamin A. Elman & Martin Kern eds., Statecraft and Classical Learning: The Rituals of Zhou in East Asian History (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), pp.181-228 [Studies in the History of Chinese Texts].
"Boats Moored and Unmoored: Reflections on the Dunhuang Manuscripts of Gao Shi's Verse", Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 73.1 (2013), pp. 83-145.
Introduction (pp.xv-lxii, jointly, with Hilde De Weerdt) and Vol. IV (pp. 84-138), in Hilde De Weerdt, Glen Dudbridge and Gabe van Beijeren eds., Wu Jing: The Essentials of Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020) [Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought].
