STAFF

TEACHING STAFF for Undergraduate and MALCS Courses 2011-2012

ACADEMIC STAFF

Associate Professors

Chairperson and UG Coordinator
Esther M.K. CHEUNG, Ph.D. (CUHK) is dedicated to teaching and research on Hong Kong cultural studies, contemporary Chinese fiction and film, critiques of modernity and postmodernity, as well as visual and urban culture in the context of globalization. She is currently Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature and Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures at University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Fruit Chan's Made in Hong Kong (HKUP) and In Pursuit of Independent Visions in Hong Kong Cinema (in Chinese, Joint Publishing), editor and coeditor of four anthologies which include The Visual Memories of Stanley Kwan (in Chinese, Joint Publishing), Between Home and World: A Reader in Hong Kong Cinema (in English, Oxford UP) and Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Edge (HKUP). Her essays have appeared in Cultural Studies, The International Journal of the Humanities, Studies on Asia, Jump Cut, China Perspectives and anthologies on Hong Kong/Chinese cinema, literature and cultural studies.
Office: MB 213A / Tel: 2859 7047 / Fax: 2857 7955 / E-mail

Postgraduate Coordinator (Mphil and doctoral studies)
Gina MARCHETTI, Ph.D. (Northwestern) teaches in the Department of Comparative Literature, School of Humanities, at the University of Hong Kong. In 1995, her book, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (University of California, 1993), won the award for best book in the area of cultural studies from the Association for Asian American Studies. Her recent books include Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's INFERNAL AFFAIRS (2002-2003) (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2007), From Tian'anmen to Times Square: Transnational China and the Chinese Diaspora on Global Screens (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2006), and Hong Kong Film, Hollywood and the New Global Cinema, co-edited with Tan See-Kam (London: Routledge, 2007).
Office: MB 210 / Tel: 2859 8900 / Fax: 2857 7955 / E-mail

Chair of MA in Literary and Cultural Studies
Esther C.M. YAU, Ph.D. (UCLA) has written on Hong Kong cinema and globalization, China's Fifth Generation, gender and film, trauma and testimony, and New Wave directors. She has published essays in The Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, The Oxford History of World Cinema, Discourse, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Wide Angle, Dangdai Dianying, Jintian, and World Cinema. She has recently published in Hong Kong Screenscapes: From the New Wave to the Digital Frontier (2011) and Chinese Connections: Critical Perspectives on Film, Identity and Diaspora (2009). Her books include: At Full Speed: Hong Kong Cinema in a Borderless World (editor, University of Minnesota Press) and New Chinese Cinemas: Forms, Identities, Politics (coeditor, Cambridge University Press). She has co-edited "Asia/Pacific: a Spectral Surface" - a special issue of positions: East Asia cultures critique. She has taught film courses at the University of California (Los Angeles & Irvine) and at the University of Southern California. She was Chair of Asian Studies Department at Occidental College where she directed Critical Studies in Film and Media. She has served as academic consultant of Chinese film exhibition projects at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the National Gallery of Art at Washington, D.C. Her courses on film engage theories of trauma and memory. She is presently working on a study of the relationship between film testimony and local memory in China and Hong Kong.
Office: MB 211 / Tel: 2241 5110 / E-mail

Assistant Professors

Sze Wei ANG, Ph.D. (Cornell). Prior to joining the Department of Comparative Literature at Hong Kong University, Ang Sze-wei was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Comparative Literature at UCLA where she taught classes that took up the questions of race, ethics, and the cultural role of religious discourses within the areas of Asian American and South East Asian Studies. She defended her dissertation at Cornell University in the summer of 2008 and has begun working on a book manuscript that traces how ethical claims converge or diverge within studies of comparative race.
Office: MB 212 / Tel: 2857 8516 / E-mail

Undergraduate Coordinator
Mirana May SZETO, Ph.D. (UCLA) is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. She did her Ph.D. in the Department of Comparative Literature, UCLA. She is working on a book entitled The Radical Itch: Cultural Politics and Its Discontents. Her current research is on Hong Kong cultural policy and politics, also a book project entitled Decolonizing Neoliberalism: Postcolonial Urban Cultural Politics. She is the P-I of the RGC GRF project entitled "Contested Cultural Imaginations in Government Practices & Community Responses: Urban Renewal Processes in Wanchai, Hong Kong." She is also part of the team research projects on "Making Cultural Clusters: New Strategies for Culture-led Urban Redevelopment" (RGC, CPU PPR) and "The Restructuring of the Movie Industry in Hong Kong: flexible specialization, Innovation and the labor Market" (RGC, GRF). She also writes on postcolonial and feminist theory, literature and film, as well as cultural studies on Hong Kong, Taiwan and China.
Office: MB 214A / Tel: 2859 2868 / Fax: 2857 7955 / Email

Sebastian Veg B.A. (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris), M.A. (Paris III), Ph.D. (Aix-Marseille I) After attending the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris, Sebastian Veg completed a PhD in comparative literature at the University of Aix-Marseille I in 2004. His dissertation was published in 2009 under the title Fictions du pouvoir chinois. Littérature, modernisme et démocratie au début du XXe siècle (Fictions of Chinese Power. Literature, modernism and democracy in the early 20th century). He was a researcher at the French Centre for Research on Contemporary China (CEFC) in Hong Kong and editor of China Perspectives from 2006 to 2010, during which time he published mainly on contemporary Chinese literature and film. His research interests are mainly in Republican literature and political theories. He is currently researching the May Fourth student movement in Sichuan, provincial autonomy, and local conceptions of democracy. (Dr. Veg will be joining the department in January 2011)
E-mail / Website

Undergraduate Chief Examiner
Daniel VUKOVICH, Ph.D. (Illinois, 2005) grew up working class near Pittsburgh, PA. His book China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the P.R.C. is forthcoming from Routledge in 2011. It makes a case for the re-constitution of orientalism since the 1970s, and is a defense of the theoretical and political complexities of Maoist and post-Mao China. It includes chapters on Tiananmen 1989, Maoist discourse, the Great Leap Forward, film studies, and the "China-reference" in contemporary cultural theory. His research interests revolve around Marxist cultural critique, the production of knowledge in intellectual-political culture, and the limits of received 'theory' vis a vis the PRC in particular but non-Western societies in general. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in positions, Cultural Critique, Journal of Contemporary China, and Cultural Logic among other places. In Chinese translation he has published on orientalism, liberalism and depoliticization, Maoist discourse, and the fiction of Zhao Shuli in China: Culture and Social Transformation (Zhejiang UP), and P.R.C. Literature in International Perspectives, 1949 - (Shanghai UP). A few texts can be viewed at: http://ssrn.com/author=945733. He is currently working towards a second book tentatively entitled Seeing Like An Other State: China and Other Problems for Cultural and Political Theory. Essays in progress include solicited ones on "global English" and "Asia and postcolonialism." He teaches postcolonial studies , critical China studies, 'theory,' and an introduction to cultural/literary analysis. Teaching website here: https://sites.google.com/site/honggangdaxue/
Office: MB 208 / Tel: 2859 7934 / E-mail

Winnie L.M. YEE, B.A. (HKU), M.A. (Warwick), M.A. (Jean-Moulin Lyon III), Ph.D. (HKU). Her research interests include modern and contemporary Chinese literature and culture, Hong Kong cultural studies, postcolonial theories, and diasporic memories. She is co-editor of Narrating Hong Kong Culture and Identity (Oxford UP, 2003) and has published on Yu Jian, Dung Kai-cheung, and Wong Bik-wan. She is currently working on the politics of memory and everyday life in Hong Kong and Chinese literature and culture.
Office: MB 212A / Tel: 2859 2869 / Email

Teachers from other departments

Marie-Paule HA, Ph.D. (Illinois Champaign-Urbana). Her interests in teaching and research include gender studies, colonial and postcolonial studies, and French and Francophone studies. She was awarded the Camargo Foundation Fellowship in 2008. She is currently working on a project that investigates the relationsip of French women to the empire. For details of her publications, please visit her personal webpage at http://www.hku.hk/history/staff-marie-paule-ha.html
(Dr. Ha is an Associate Professor in the Department of History).
Tel: 2859 7933 / E-mail
Course website

Marco WAN, Ph.D. (Cambridge) is an Assistant Professor of law and an Honorary Assistant Professor of English. His areas of interest include law and literature; legal/critical theory (especially deconstruction and psychoanalysis); and interdisciplinary legal studies. He holds degrees from the University of Cambridge and Yale University, and has been the recipient of the Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellowship, the Fox International Fellowship, and the Evan-Lewis Thomas Law Studentship. He is a member of the editorial boards of the International Journal for the Semiotics of Law and the Hong Kong Law Journal, and is on the selection committee of the Man Asian Literary Prize.
E-mail

Teaching Consultants

Jason Ka-hang HO, Ph.D. (HKU). His areas of interest in teaching and research include Asian cinema, film and cultural studies, popular culture, gender and sexuality, and queer studies. He has published an article on Yon Fan and Lou Ye in LGBT Transnational Identity in Media: Post Colonial Post Queer (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming) and a Chinese essay on Love Unto Waste and The Island Tales in In Critical Proximity: The Visual Memories of Stanley Kwan (Joint Publishing, 2007). He is currently working and researching on contemporary East Asian films and their circulations, with a specific focus on New Korean Cinema and cinematic regionalism.
Office: MB 212A / Tel: 2859 2763 / Email

Fiona Yuk-wa Law, Ph.D. (HKU). Her research interests include film studies (Chinese-language cinemas, Asian cinemas in the context of globalization and the modernist tradition in European cinema), film theories, visual cultures and Hong Kong cultural studies. She published an article on Center Stage and Rouge in In Critical Proximity: The Visual Memories of Stanley Kwan (in Chinese, Joint Publishing). Currently, she is working on a book project about the cultural study of Chinese New Year films made in Hong Kong and the PRC from 1950s to the present.
Office: MB 248 / Tel: 2859 2765 / Email

Post-Doctoral Fellow

Arnika FUHRMANN, Ph.D. (Chicago) is an interdisciplinary scholar of Thailand working at the intersections of the country's aesthetic and political modernities. After completing her Ph.D. in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago (2008), she took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. In September 2010 she joined the University of Hong Kong's Society of Scholars in the Humanities as a research scholar. Recent articles have appeared in Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, Oriens Extremus, and positions: east asia cultures critique (forthcoming 2011). Her book project Ghostly Desires examines how Buddhist-coded anachronisms of haunting figure struggles over sexuality in contemporary Thai cinema. Her new research project, Under Permanent Exception: Violence, Buddhist-Muslim Coexistence, and (New) Media in the Thai South, extends her interests in sexuality and cinema into the domain of interreligious conflict. It proposes a reframing of understandings of Buddhist-Muslim antagonisms through the analysis of their quotidian, affective dimensions and through concentration on the ways in which non-state actors approach coexistence.
Email

Zhao Xun 趙尋 Ph.D. (PKU) completed his doctorate in the Department Of Chinese Literature and Language in Peking University in 2005. His research and teaching interests lie in intellectual history, political philosophy, poetry and the history of art. He has published four books including Reflections: Chinese Modernities as Self-conscious Cultural Ventures (Co-author, Oxford University Press, 2006) and World Literature in the Twentieth Century (Co-author, Peking University Press, 2002). He has published 30 articles in journals such as Chinese Thought, Literary Review, Studies On Modern Chinese Literature, Lu Xun Research Monthly, Dushu, and Today. His new books, The Rise and Fall of Class Theory in China (Peking University Press) and Refreshing Constitutions: The Spiritual Tradition of Chinese culture (East China Normal University Press), are forthcoming in 2009-2010.
Office: MB 248 / Tel: 2241 5293 / Email

Honorary Professors

Prof. Ackbar ABBAS
Prof. Jeremy TAMBLING
Prof. Gordon SLETHAUG

Honorary Assistant Professors

Dr. Paul KONG
Dr. Fiona LAW
Dr. Anthony SIU
Dr. Mirana May SZETO
Dr. Sebastian VEG