Chihyin Hsiao studies English material from eighteenth to nineteenth century. Her PhD thesis analysed the consumption patterns of foreign luxury in eighteenth-century England. After her PhD, Chihyin received the Holland Fellowship from Durham University, UK. She is now assistant professor of NYCU, focusing on working-class diets of nineteenth-century England.

Funded by NSTC Taiwan for three years, ‘Newspapers, Magazines and Cookery Books: A Reinvestigation on Working Class Food Consumption in Nineteenth-century England’ is a unique project that investigates the patterns of food consumption by the English working-classes through a comprehensive archival research of newspapers, magazines and cookery books in the nineteenth century. By systematically going through nineteenth-century Englisg periodicals, this research will contest the long-entrenched assumption of how the urban working-classes eat and live, providing new raw materials to historians in Taiwan and the UK. The academic objectives are as follows: to expand the current use of archival evidence and to contextualize these findings through the narratives of reporters, campaigners and common workers.