Nicholas Bartlett

Nicholas Bartlett is an assistant professor of contemporary Chinese culture and society at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is an anthropologist whose research focuses on addiction and recovery, labor, embodiment, historicity, and civil society. His first book, Recovering Histories: Life and Labor after Heroin in Reform-era China, was published by the University of California and Columbia Weatherhead Presses in October 2020.

Emerging from 18 months of fieldwork based in a tin mining city in southern Yunnan province, Bartlett’s research offers an intimate account of middle-aged, long-term heroin users’ experiences recovering from addiction. Rather than foregrounding the difficulties of overcoming their dependency on opioids, members of this generational cohort drew attention to the challenges of attempting to find a place in reform-era China that no longer resembled either the tightly knit Maoist work units of their childhood or the disorienting but opportunity-filled chaos of the mining boom occurring in their early careers. In navigating fraught wedding rituals, performing compulsory labor and emulating later-arriving entrepreneurs, individuals attempting to “return to society” decades after their first contact with heroin elucidate shared struggles of inhabiting China’s contested present.

Bartlett completed his PhD in medical anthropology at UC Berkeley and UCSF and received training in psychoanalytic studies at the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles after studying and working in international public health and receiving a BA from Pomona College. He is co-chair of Columbia University’s Modern China Seminar and teaches courses on topics including culture, mental health, and healing, labor, desire, and trauma.