Nick Stember is a London-based media historian and translator of Chinese literature and popular culture. His work focuses on the remediation of the past through historical fiction and graphic narrative, considering the combined impacts of public policy, private investment, and emerging technologies on the material conditions for the production and consumption of mass art and commercial entertainment.

Having completed a MA thesis on cartoonists and left-wing political activists in Shanghai from the mid-1920s to the early 1930s at the University of British Columbia in 2016, he spent several years as a full time translator and publishing consultant, working closely with rights agents and acquisitions editors in China and abroad. For his PhD dissertation at the University of Cambridge (completed in 2023) he turned to the early Reform-era (1976-1983) People’s Republic of China, writing a history of government-supported “pulp science” in the countless socialist (and not-so-socialist) science fiction and science popularization comic books published at this critical moment.

In 2024, he was employed as a postdoctoral researcher at the National Museum of Denmark, where he studied visual depictions of Daoist self-cultivation in comics, animation, and video games, as part of the New East Asian Storytelling with Historical Dramas as Motor project (NØM), funded by the Velux Foundation, in collaboration with the University of Southern Denmark and The Animation Workshop at VIA University College, Viborg. During his time at the museum, he helped coordinate the production of a graphic novel by the Chinese cartoonist Nie Jun, which was exhibited at the museum Nov-Dec 2024, and again at the Danish Cultural Centre in Beijing Jan-Mar 2025.

He is currently a judge for the Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 2025 Translated Young Adult Literature Book Prize, and a co-editor with Laura Pozzi (University of Warsaw) and Mariia Guleva (Charles University, Prague) of the (proposed) Brill Handbook of Chinese Comics and Cartoons.

If you have any suggestions for future projects, please reach out!