New Trends in Hong Kong Studies: A Roundtable

This is a hybrid event.

The in-person roundtable is held at SHHK Conference Room (SHHK-05-57), and the virtual broadcast is on Zoom. For Zoom attendance, please register at the Zoom link to receive meeting details.

There has recently been a dramatic increase in scholarly interest in many features of Hong Kong’s pre-1997 history and post-1997 situation, as well as some notable efforts to connect the two periods. This roundtable will feature two visiting scholars (Vivian Kong and Jeffrey Wasserstrom) who are based in different parts of the world (the UK and the US) and have written most about Hong Kong’s period as a British colony and Hong Kong’s period as a part of the PRC, respectively, and it will be moderated by an NTU specialist in Hong Kong studies (Florence Mok). The moderator will draw the speakers out on what they feel are the most interesting recent developments in Hong Kong studies as it is being practiced in the places they teach and in the fields within Hong Kong studies they know best, and then bring in her own ideas and oversee a conversation that includes the audience.

Speakers:

Vivian Kong is Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Bristol. Born and raised in Hong Kong, she received her BA and MPhil from the University of Hong Kong, and completed her PhD at Bristol in 2019. She has published articles on British identities and civil society in interwar Hong Kong, and is completing a book manuscript entitled Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong 1910-1945 with Cambridge University Press. She has also embarked on a new book project about an Anglo-Chinese Eurasian woman, and the web of family relationships she had in Hong Kong, Britain, China, and Singapore, 1887-1943. Since her PhD she has worked closely with the Hong Kong History Project, an initiative hosted at the University of Bristol to encourage and facilitate the study of Hong Kong history. 

Chairperson:

Florence Mok is a Nanyang Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is a historian of colonial Hong Kong and modern China, with an interest in environmental history, the Cold War and state-society relations. She completed her PhD in History at the University of York in 2019. Her doctoral research examined governance and political culture in the 1970s Hong Kong. Her postdoctoral project explored Chinese Communist cultural activities in colonial Hong Kong during the Cold War. She is currently studying the history of natural disasters and crisis management. The study explores how the colonial government and the Chinese society in Hong Kong mitigated environmental crises (water shortage, flooding, typhoon and seasonal epidemics) from 1945 to 1980. Florence is one of the founders of the Hong Kong Research Hub (HKRH) at NTU and an Executive Board member of the Society for Hong Kong Studies (SHKS). She has published peer-reviewed articles in well-respected interdisciplinary and historical journals; the China Information article won the Eduard B. Vermeer Best Article Prize in 2019 and ICAS Best Article Prize on Global Hong Kong Studies in 2021. She is currently working with Manchester University Press to turn her thesis into a monograph named Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97.