New Fellows Bring Talent Diversity to the Academy
November 19, 2019
President Maureen Sabine: I’d like to extend a warm welcome to the new Fellows and Junior Fellows elected at the Academy’s 2019 AGM, and introduce HKAH scholars to the dynamic contribution each has made to the humanities in Hong Kong.
New Fellows
From top left: Louise Cummings, Kendall Johnson, Julia Kuehn, Clayton G. MacKenzie, Robert Peckham, Jalal Toufic, and Wu Cuncun.
Louise Cummings is a Professor in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She teaches and conducts research in clinical linguistics, pragmatic language disorders and the effect of neurodegeneration on the social language skills of adults with dementia. She has produced books such as the Cambridge Handbook of Communication Disorders and Reasoning and Public Health, and is a member of the International Research Centre for the Advancement of Health Communication and the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists. Louise is currently developing a service-learning subject which will involve work with children who have special educational needs. She illustrates how humanities scholars use their professional expertise for the public good.
Kendall A. Johnson was Head of the School of Modern Languages and Cultures and Director of the American Studies programme at The University of Hong Kong, and is now a Professor of Literature in the School of English. His most recent book, The New Middle Kingdom: China and the Early American Romance of Free Trade, was published with Johns Hopkins University Press in 2017. Earlier work on the narratives of free trade shaping early US-China commercial relations also reflects how Kendall’s humanities scholarship traverses American and China Studies and reconstructs a geo-political history of great importance to Hong Kong.
Julia Kuehn is Professor of English and Head of its School at The University of Hong Kong. Her area of expertise is nineteenth-century English literature and culture, with a special focus on the Victorian novel, women’s, popular and travel writing. She is a prolific publisher of critical editions and monographs which include A Female Poetics of Empire. Her latest GRF-funded book project will enable her to expand her interest in travel writing to trace its long-term influence over the novel form not only in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries but beyond. As a Director of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival and the Young Readers Festival, Julia has engaged in community work which recognizes the important place of literature in civil society.
Clayton G. MacKenzie is Provost at Hong Kong Baptist University, and has headed other academic units in Hong Kong, London, and Adelaide. His publications span a remarkable range of subjects from literature, language and cultural studies, to creative writing, the performing arts, and higher education policy. Over the course of his career, Clayton has distinguished himself not only as a humanities scholar who has produced three monographs but a creative practitioner who has authored two novels and had a play performed at London’s Royal Court Theatre. He brings the multi talents of a man for all seasons to his current role of senior administrator and university leader in Hong Kong.
Robert Peckham is MB Lee Professor in the Humanities and Medicine and Chair of the Department of History at The University of Hong Kong. As founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine, he took the lead in research and teaching that crossed disciplinary boundaries and focused on issues of great consequence in the public domain. His latest book with Cambridge on Epidemics in Modern Asia reflects his interest in the spread and social impact of infectious disease.
Jalal Toufic is a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. Before coming to Hong Kong, he was Director of the School of Visual Arts in the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts and had achieved recognition as a cultural leader, philosopher, writer, and video artist. His Video Trilogy on Cities and Their Imaginal Complements (link), which includes a segment shot during An Indefinite Visit to Hong Kong, was exhibited in Amman, Shenzhen and Rome. His commitment as a teacher to “Art-Provoking Thought” is evident not only in the video art which he has exhibited across the globe, but in his recent book What Was I Thinking?
Wu Cuncun is Professor of Chinese Literature and Head of the School of Chinese at The University of Hong Kong. She has published widely on gender and sexuality in traditional Chinese literature with works such as Sex and Sensibility in Ming-Qing Society (in Chinese) and Homoerotic Sensibilities in Late Imperial China (in English). However, her most recent research has shifted from traditional literature to focus on popular songbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth century from northern Chinese cities. In examining what they say about non-elite attitudes to life and love, and how they diversify our understanding of Chinese women’s societal position in the past, Cuncun is restoring marginalized subjects to the center of attention in the humanities.
New Junior Fellows
From left: Phoenix W. Y. Lam, Phoebe Lin, and Dorothy Tse Hiu Hung.
Phoenix W. Y. Lam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University who conducts research in corpus linguistics, discourse analysis and linguistic landscapes. Her research is firmly grounded in Hong Kong with a focus on the online place branding of the city, and the media and e-commerce discourses it uses. Phoenix’s work is of interest not only to other linguists but industry practitioners, and illustrates the role that humanities scholars can play in providing informed policy advice to the business community.
Phoebe Lin is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. She is an applied linguistics who has expanded her English vocabulary research to study language acquisition through internet media. A generously funded HKSAR Government project gave her the opportunity to develop computer apps which benefit both English language learners and researchers. Phoebe has also used her expertise to help the community by volunteering her services as a school consultant, and by encouraging her own English students to produce fund-raising websites for charities and minority groups.
Dorothy Tse Hiu Hung is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. She is an award-winning writer of short stories in Chinese and a scholar of modern Chinese Literature who is known for her critical work on the Hong Kong author Xi Xi. She is currently working on a research project which looks at the city and fiction of Hong Kong in the 1930s; but, at the same time, she remains active in the Hong Kong youth literary magazine Fleurs des lettres and the literary organization Pen Hong Kong. As a creative writing teacher, Dorothy demonstrates how HKAH fellows can contribute to matters of importance and concern to the humanities in Hong Kong by helping her students to publish their writing responses to social issues in Hong Kong.
First Book Prize Winner
Hawk Chang Tsung Chi is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Literature and Cultural Studies at The Education University of Hong Kong. His research interest in Modern and Contemporary Irish Literature led to post-doctoral study at Trinity College Dublin. His further interest in the short story genre and women’s writing inspired the book manuscript which won the 2019 First Book Prize, Ireland Then and Now: Traditions and Differences in Contemporary Irish Short Fiction. His submission was praised for its contribution to the humanities in showing “how literature can highlight many of the blind spots in a culture’s thinking about itself and its motivations in dealing with societal changes.”
Maureen Sabine (left) and Hawk Chang Tsung Chi (right) as he receives his book prize.
For a full list of all Fellows in the Academy, click here.