Professor Ting Xu

Biography

Professor Ting Xu joined Essex Law School in July 2020. She holds an LLB from Sun Yat-sen University and an LLM (with Distinction) and PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Before joining Essex, she was Senior Lecturer at the School of Law, University of Sheffield (2015–2020), Lecturer at the School of Law, Queen's University Belfast (2012–2015), and Research Fellow at LSE (2009–2012), where she worked on an interdisciplinary and collaborative project funded by the European Research Council. She is a Senior Fellow of Advance HE (SFHEA). She has taught extensively in property law, comparative law, legal research, and Chinese law, convening and delivering modules including Land Law, Equity and Trusts, Commercial Property in a Global Context, Contemporary Issues in Property Law, Comparative Law, and Legal Research Skills. Her research adopts interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to property law, with particular interests in socio-legal studies, comparative property law, law and development, governance, Chinese law, and political economy. Her recent work explores resilience, legal knowledge, and institutional adaptation in property systems, bringing together legal theory, socio-legal research, and comparative analysis to examine how law responds to uncertainty and social change. She welcomes proposals from prospective doctoral researchers working in property law, comparative law, Chinese law, socio-legal studies, law and development, governance, and political economy. She is the author and editor of three books: The Revival of Private Property and Its Limits in Post-Mao China (Wildy, Simmonds & Hill Publishing, 2014); Property and Human Rights in a Global Context (co-edited with Jean Allain, Hart Publishing, 2015); and Legal Strategies for the Development and Protection of Communal Property (co-edited with Alison Clarke, Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. 216, Oxford University Press, 2018). Her research has attracted competitive funding from the British Academy, the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust, the European Commission, and China's National Social Science Foundation. In 2012, she was awarded a British Academy Conference Grant (with Professor Patrick O'Brien) to organise an international conference on knowledge formation and the history of books. In 2015, she completed a European Commission Joint Research Centre project examining declining diversity and the global economy. She subsequently led the British Academy-funded project Diversifying Ownership of Land? Communal Property in the UK and China (2014–2017), through which she founded and directed an international Communal Property Research Network comprising 41 scholars from 13 countries. She also served as Co-Investigator on the National Social Science Foundation of China-funded project Land Rights Reform in Rural China (2015–2017) (Principal Investigator: Professor Fengzhang Li, Shanghai University). She was awarded a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship (2019–2020) and a British Academy/Leverhulme Trust Senior Research Fellowship (2023-24). She has held visiting appointments at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King's College London, the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, LSE Law School, the Centre for Law and Society at Cardiff University, the School of Law at Jilin University, and the Graduate School of the University of International Business and Economics in China. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). She serves on the Research Committee of the Society of Legal Scholars (SLS) and is a member of the ESRC Assessor College, the ESRC Peer Review College, the AHRC Peer Review College, and the UKRI Talent Peer Review College. She regularly reviews grant applications and research proposals for UK and international funding bodies and serves as a referee for leading academic journals and publishers. Beyond academia, she has provided consultancy for the Scottish Land Commission, the European Commission, Global Witness, and Friends of the Earth Europe. Her work has informed policy debates on property law, land governance, communal ownership, and sustainable development in both domestic and international contexts.

Qualifications

• PhD London School of Economics, (2009)

• LLM London School of Economics, (2005)

• LLB Sun Yat-sen University, (2004)

Appointments

University of Essex

• Professor, Law, University of Essex (7/7/2020 - present)