Trained as an architect, Yue Zhuang studied for her first PhD in Chinese architectural history and theory at Tianjin University in China, where she was also a permanent lecturer in landscape history. Her second PhD at the University of Edinburgh broadened her research interests to include the history and theory of the 18th-century British landscape art. She then spent two years as an EU Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the University Research Priority Programme ―Asia and Europe at the University of Zurich before joining the University of Exeter in 2013.
Dr Yue Zhuang specialises in the landscape art history of China and Britain in the early modern as well as the cross-cultural contacts between China and Europe during the same period. Her recent projects, 'Matteo Ripa's "Views of Jehol",' funded by EU Marie Curie Actions, and 'Entangled Landscapes' initiated an innovative paradigm of research, examining the entangled histories of landscape exchange between China and Europe. Yue is further developing this new research paradigm in her second research project ‘Nature Entangled,’ also funded by EU Marie Curie Actions from October 2014 -2018.
Yue has published extensively in the fields of landscape theory and history of both China and Europe; and in Chinese-European cultural contacts in the early modern as well as in contemporary urban design and environmental issues. Two recent articles were on Sir William Chambers’ Dissertation on Oriental Gardening (Transcultural Studies) and Matteo Ripa’s copperplate engravings of Bishu shanzhuang shi (Getty Research Institute).
She has supervised doctoral research in the areas of landscape history in China and Chinese-European cultural exchange from 1700-1800.
She is a member of the AHRC Peer Review College.