Delia Davin
| Delia Davin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
9 June 1944 Oxford, United Kingdom |
| Died | 13 October 2016 (aged 72) Leeds, United Kingdom |
| Occupation | Writer, translator, lecturer |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | University of Leeds |
| Notable awards | President of the British Association for Chinese Studies |
| Relatives |
Dan Davin (father) Winnie Davin (mother) |
Delia Davin (9 June 1944 – 13 October 2016) was a writer and lecturer on Chinese society and particularly Chinese women's stories. She was one of the first foreign scholars to consider the impact of the policies of the Chinese Communist Party on women.
From 1988 until her retirement in 2004, Davin taught Chinese history at Leeds University, where she became a chaired professor. She was also head of the Department of East Asian Studies and deputy head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures. Before going to Leeds, she had taught in the Department of Economics and Related Studies at the University of York, where she was a founding member of York’s Centre for Women's Studies. The British Association for Chinese Studies elected her president for 1993–1994, and the China Panel of the British Academy made her a member, as did the Executive Council of the Universities’ China Committee in London.
Davin was born in Oxford, England, to an expatriate literary family of Irish descent who had emigrated from New Zealand. Her father Dan Davin was an editor at the Clarendon Press and her mother Winnie Davin (née Gonley) was an editor at Oxford University Press. Davin left school at the age of 15 and finished her high school studies through evening classes.
In 1963, aged 19, she went to Beijing with a group of foreign experts and taught English at the Beijing Broadcasting Institute until 1965. She described her students there in a letter home as "very serious about their work but [having] a gaiety which saves them from being priggish." Her friend, the China specialist John Gittings, later remarked that her contact with these students, many of whom came from working class backgrounds, "gave Davin an intuitive understanding of the Chinese that would enrich her long academic career" and that at this time she already showed "a mature sensitivity for the contradictions of revolutionary China."
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