I write about literature, art, and cultural history for the London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, Apollo Magazine and others.

My research spans French, Middle Eastern and global history. I am particularly interested in how people come to know and think about situations far removed from their own. As part of this, I am currently completing a DPhil on the history of international news in colonial Algeria. I have also launched a larger collaborative project on 'The Politics of Colonial Comparison' to understand how colonial empires compared themselves to each other. Beyond modern North Africa and France, I am interested in theories of settler colonialism, and more broadly in the relationship between social segregation and empathy.

I am currently completing two complementary but independent and self-standing books which are contracted to appear with Cambridge University Press.  Both are concerned with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the era of Mao Zedong, both deal with religion, and both combine political with social and cultural history. Both are concerned with what I call ‘supernatural politics’, i.e. those zones where the culture and politics of the CCP interacted, resonated or overlapped with folk religious culture (book 1); or, conversely, where ordinary people used folk belief and ritual to understand and contest the power of the state and, relatedly, sought to expand their power through recourse to non-visible entities (book 2). Both books are based on substantial work in archives in the PRC and on so-called neibu (for internal circulation only) publications -- sources that are now under restricted access. The fundamental aims of the two books, however, are quite distinct. The first, Supernatural Politics: Mao Zedong and the Drive to Eliminate Religion in China, 1949-79, focuses on the ideological and institutional policies of the CCP towards the five religions that it recognized, and towards folk religion, which it did not.  A central concern is to explore what the CCP’s very mixed record in seeking to eliminate religion tells us about the workings of the party-state and the limits of its power. The second volume, Communism in an Enchanted World: Chinese Folk Religion under Mao Zedong, focuses on the many dimensions of folk religion and on the ritual specialists who sustained it, and on the grassroots interventions of the CCP to eliminate what it called ‘feudal superstition’. A central concern is to explore how folk religion survived, despite prolonged ideological and political assault and, relatedly, how it accommodated to, and was shaped by, the prodigious socio-economic and political changes unleashed after 1949, and was poised to make a remarkable comeback after 1980.

I mainly work on the literary, social, and intellectual history of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France. My current work is on the early modern relation between literature and learning on the one hand, and social hierarchy on the other. Previous projects on encyclopaedism, curiosity, and posthumous presence investigated how different kinds of knowledge and belief were represented, and in particular how they were shaped by language.

Through the British Academy I am involved in work on language policy within education and society.

My present research projects include a monograph on the history of hypothetical syllogistic, a study on the logic of vagueness and higher-order vagueness, as well as further explorations of Stoic logic and of its relations to Frege and 19th‒20th century logic. I also retain an interest in determinism, freedom, and responsibility and in MAP.

My abiding interest is in the history of Late Antiquity (from the mid-third century A.D. to the mid-eighth) in both Europe and the Mediterranean. Within that I work on two distinct areas: the Roman Empire under the successors of Constantine (from 337 to 366 A.D.), and the writing and circulation of letters and letter collections in the early-medieval West (from c.400 to 700).

My research lies at the intersection of economic history and international economics. In particular, I’ve done a lot of work on the history of globalization and deglobalization, and am still working on these themes. I’m currently working on interwar trade and trade policy, and am also interested in the relationships between trade and war. Other current projects include a history of economic growth in the 20th century, and quantifying the importance of coal during the industrial revolution.

I work mostly on topics concerned with the operation of markets. This includes research on how firms chooses their prices, including issues to do with offering discounts when consumers buy multiple units or products, or when consumers care about how many other customers also choose to buy from the firm, and how consumers search for products and prices. Particular markets studied include telecommunication and media, scientific publishing, markets for "market information", and markets where some consumers can be "pressured" into buying.

Chris Frith completed his series of seminars on metacognition and is currently collaborating on writing an account of explicit metacognition and communication. He published articles on volition, on the we-mode, and on schizophrenia, and gave lectures at The Pontifical Academy of Sciences, at the Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, and at Harvard University.