The magic of that brief visit was to colour a childhood spent in the London of the depressed thirties, when his beloved mother died and his father, workless, had to do his best for his four children with the dole.

The adjustment might well have been made, but for a visit to Ireland that threw open a door on a half–forgotten memory. In the alien air of London the family remained a close knit Irish unit, further delaying the children’s adjustment to a new kind of life.

The factors that made a displaced person of Michael Stapleton are the subject of this book, commencing with the family’s departure from Ireland while he was a small child. The very young are often blessed with a merciful faculty of forgetting, but some things always remain to haunt their later lives as unfinished business. Not from their homes, merely, though that is often the first wrench but also the uprooting which is inevitable when they begin to question the values by which their early lives are lived. Theo’s PhD is funded by the AHRC Open Oxford Cambridge Doctoral Training Program, the Cambridge Trust International Scholarship, and the St John’s Benefactor Scholarship.The term ‘displaced person’ has taken on a special meaning in our day and age, but its implications can be applied with equal truth to the plight of many children who find themselves uprooted at an early age. After completing an honours degree in Asian Studies (2018), he undertook a master's degree at Oxford in Contemporary China Studies where he received the Ko Cheuk-hung Prize for best thesis (2019), and most recently he finished a second master's degree at Peking University as a Yenching scholar where he studied anthropology (2020). Prior to his PhD, Theo studied philosophy at the University of Western Australia, but also spent two years on exchange in Beijing as a New Colombo Plan scholar (2015-2017). His undergraduate thesis on the emergence of transcultural Humanistic Buddhism has recently been published in the Asian Studies Review, and Theo has also written about international education in China. He plans to do fieldwork in the city of Putian, Fujian Province, China. Theo’s PhD research focuses on a contemporary Chinese Buddhist charity that has adopted a strategy of secular-sacred hybridity, manifest in its relationship to the state, hybrid institutions, and polysemic moral values.

The Threshold by Michael Stapleton