My research interests relate to the late Qing and Republican eras of mainland China, the histories of the British Consular Service and the Imperial Maritime Customs Service in China, and the Sino-Tibetan borderlands..

I focus upon the history of European, Russian, American, and Japanese incursions into East Asia, systems of imperialism/colonialism, extraterritoriality and 'informal empire'; examining science, exploration and empire through East/West cultural perceptions, encounters and exchange, as well as cross-cultural/inter-racial relationships and identity.

I am especially interested in Western and Japanese travellers in Asia, particularly in China and Tibet during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the various motivations for these travellers' journeys; such as - scientific exploration (botanical/geographical/archaeological/geological/anthropological), as well as political/diplomatic, and religious/humanitarian missions, along with the personal stories of such travellers' narratives and the contemporaneous Western appetite for explorers' travelogues and tales of 'real adventure.'

PhD thesis title: "Empirical Adventurers: Science and Imperial Exploration in East Tibet, 1900-1949"
Tim Chamberlain – Birkbeck College, University of London (2015 onwards)
PhD supervisors: Prof. Julia Lovell (Birkbeck, University of London), and Prof. Naoko Shimazu (Yale-NUS).

I am also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.