SEP 4 | THU | 4:00 PM (HKT) | LECTURE The Prosecution of Transgender as Heterodoxy in Qing Dynasty China Speaker:Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University Discussant: Professor Bin Bin Yang, Associate Professor, School of Chinese, HKU Chair: Professor Weilin Xiao, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU
SEP 5 | FRI | 2:00 PM (HKT) | SEMINAR What Three Cases tell us about the Qing Judicial System Speaker: Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University Moderators: Christine Walker, Associate Professor, Department of History, HKU Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Speaker: Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University
Moderators: Christine Walker, Associate Professor, Department of History, HKU Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, September 5, 2025 Time: 2:00 to 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430) 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower Language: English. The legal texts discussed during the seminar are available in Chinese only. In-person event for HKU students. Registration is required:https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_hdetail.aspx?ueid=102322
During this interactive seminar, Professor Sommer will introduce three texts that illustrate different aspects of the Qing judicial system. The texts will be shared prior to the event to encourage questions and discussion.
Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. A social and legal historian of Qing dynasty China (1644–1912), his research uses original legal case records from local and central archives to explore gender, sexuality, and family. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the John Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.
This seminar is co-organised by the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law in the Faculty of Law, and the Department of History and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
Speaker:Professor Matthew H. Sommer, Bowman Family Professor of History, Stanford University
Discussant: Professor Bin Bin Yang, Associate Professor, School of Chinese, HKU
Chair: Professor Weilin Xiao, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU
Date & Time: September 4, 2025 (Thursday) 16:00-18:00 Venue: Academic Conference Room, 11/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong Language: English (In-person event) Registration Link:http://bit.ly/3GGgBat
Matthew Sommer’s new book The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China(Columbia UP 2024)considers a range of transgender experiences in Ming-Qing China, illuminating how certain forms of gender transgression were sanctioned in particular contexts and penalized in others. This talk focuses on the crime of “a male masquerading in female attire” (男扮女裝), which was prosecuted by applying the statute against “using deviant ways and heterodox principles to incite and deceive the common people” (左道異端煽惑人民). Anatomical males who presented as women sometimes took a conventionally female occupation such as midwife, faith healer, or even medium to a fox spirit — yet, suspected of sexual predation, they risked death if they came to official attention, even when they had lived peacefully in their communities for years.
Matthew H. Sommer (BA Swarthmore, MA U. of Washington, PHD UCLA) is the Bowman Family Professor of History at Stanford University. A social and legal historian of Qing dynasty China (1644-1912), his research uses original legal case records from local and central archives to explore gender, sexuality, and family. He is the author of Sex, Law, and Society in Late Imperial China (Stanford 2000) and Polyandry and Wife-Selling in Qing Dynasty China (California 2015), which was the inaugural winner of the American Society for Legal History’s Peter Gonville Stein Book Award. His latest book, The Fox Spirit, the Stone Maiden, and Other Transgender Histories from Late Imperial China (Columbia 2024) won the Boswell Prize from the LGBTQ+ History Association.
This seminar is co-organised by the Philip K.H. Wong Centre for Chinese Law in the Faculty of Law, and the Department of History and Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
August 4, 5, 6, 2025 Run Run Shaw Tower, The University of Hong Kong
This summer school is co-sponsored by the China, Humanities, and Global Studies research hub at the University of Hong Kong (Faculty of Arts) and the Graduate Program of the School of International Relations and Public Affairs of Fudan University.
It features lecture-discussions and a roundtable spread over three afternoons and led by Professors Daniel Vukovich (胡德) and Daniel Elam from HKU, and Li Haimo (李海默), Li Yin (李寅), Yin Peiqiu (银培萩), Yin Zhiguang (殷之光), and Zhang Xueying (张雪滢) from Fudan. Together we will examine some of the history, problems, current prospects, and intellectual questions subtending the global south, modernization, development, Bandung, colonialism or empire, and political economy. This HKU event also forms part of the Fudan Graduate School’s ten-year project “China and the World under Great Changes.”
Dates: August 4, 5, 6, 2025 Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU Language: English
Registration is open to all HKU Research Postgraduate students. Please note that this is a non-credit-bearing program. It is simply an opportunity to enhance one’s learning and exchange views about the global south, the current conjuncture (and older, colonial ones), and related theoretical and empirical issues. Readings are available here. All are welcome but space is very limited so please register only if you will actually attend all three days.
Day 1, August 4: 1:45 pm Introduction | coffee and snacks 2:00-3:00 pm Professor Yin Zhiguang (殷之光) Theorising the Future, Global South and the Historical Continuum of World Order Making 3:30-4:30 pm Professor Dan Vukovich (胡德) The New Global Conjuncture?: Problems of Method & Interpretation 4:30-5:30 pm Professor Li Haimo (李海默) The Global South from a Burkean Perspective
Day 2, August 5: 1:45 pm Coffee and snacks 2:00-3:00 pm Professor Zhang Xueying (张雪滢) Will China Take the Leadership Vacuum? 3:30-4:30 pm Professor Yin Peiqiu (银培萩) The Evolution and Constraints of Congressional Power in U.S.–China Tech Competition: Insights from the TikTok Act
Day 3, August 6: 1:45 pm Coffee and snacks 2:00-3:00 pm Professor Daniel Elam Tristes-Tropiques or Global South: Nation-Building, World-Making, and Post-Independence Anticolonial Thought 3:30-4:30 pm Professor Li Yin (李寅) China’s Innovation and Development: Phenomenon, Consequences, and Implications for the Global South 5:00-5:30 pm Discussion
Prof. Dan Vukovich (胡德), HKU, School of Humanities
Dan Vukovich (胡德) is an inter-disciplinary scholar who works on issues of colonialism/imperialism and critical theory in relation to the intellectual and political history of the “China-West” relationship. He has worked in Hong Kong since 2006, after earlier stints at Hocking College and UC Santa Cruz before and after his PhD from the University of Illinois, Urbana. He is currently Chair of the Comp Lit Program at HKU and has been an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing and a Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学). He is the author of three monographs, including China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019) and most recently After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s first Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). In these three books and in numerous articles he is concerned with the age-old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge (and ‘real’ politics), and the dialectics of difference and universality.
Prof. Daniel Elam, HKU, School of Humanities
Daniel Elam is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He specialises in transnational Asian and African literatures in the twentieth century, modernism, postcolonial theory, and global intellectual history. He is the author of World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth (Fordham University Press, 2020) and Impossible and Necessary (Orient BlackSwan, 2020).
Prof. Li Haimo (李海默), Fudan University
Li Haimo is currently assistant professor in political science at Fudan University, Shanghai. His major research area is American political thought and Contemporary American Politics. His academic works in English have been formally published in top-tier journals such as History of Political Thought (A&HCI, Q1), Law and History Review (SSCI, A&HCI Q1), The European Legacy (A&HCI, Q2), Journal of British Studies (SSCI and A&HCI, Q1), and European Journal of International Law (SSCI, Q1).
Prof. Li Yin (李寅), Fudan University
Li Yin is an Associate Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University, and Associate Director of the Shanghai Center for Innovation and Governance at Fudan University. His research focuses on innovation, industrial policy and economic development. He is the author of China’s Drive for the Technology Frontier: Indigenous Innovation in the High-Tech Industry (Routledge, 2023). His research has been published in journals, such as Research Policy, Technovation, and Issues in Science and Technology. He also writes frequently for Wenhua Zongheng (Beijing Cultural Review).
Prof. Yin Peiqiu (银培萩), Fudan University
Yin Peiqiu is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. Her research focuses on U.S. foreign policy, philanthropy, and the intersection of technology, religion, and international relations, with particular emphasis on the role of elite networks—such as philanthropic foundations and think tanks—in shaping global power dynamics. Her work appeared on CSSCI journals such as Contemporary Asia-Pacific Studies, Foreign Affairs Review, and Contemporary World & Socialism, among others. Her book, Dark Money Politics: Philanthropic Foundations and American Hegemony (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2022), examines the influence of private foundations on U.S. hegemony. Dr. Yin holds a Ph.D. in International Politics from Fudan University and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University.
Prof. Yin Zhiguang (殷之光), Fudan University
Yin Zhiguang is a Professor in international politics at the Fudan University. His research interest lies mainly in the area of Chinese modern intellectual and legal history, ethnic minority policy, 19-20 century history of international relations, imperial history, and Sino-Middle Eastern relations. His research and teaching centre on a theoretical interests in understanding the making of the modern world order through the dynamic tension between domination and resistance. His current projects include studies of liberal imperialism and Afro-Asian solidarity movements with a particular interests in Sino-African, Sino-Middle Eastern relations and pan-Africanism. His most recent monographs include: A New World: Afro-Asian Solidarity and the PRC’s Imagination of Global Order (Chinese, 2022), and Politics of Art: The Creation Society and the Practice of Theoretical Struggle in Revolutionary China (Brill, 2014). His articles appear in English and Chinese academic journals such as European Journal of International Law, Third World Quarterly, History, Turkish Journal of Sociology, Shehui Kexue (Social Sciences), and Kaifang Shidai (Open Times).
Prof. Zhang Xueying (张雪滢), Fudan University
Zhang Xueying is an Assistant Professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs and a Research Fellow at the Center for American Studies at Fudan University. Her research focuses on international institutions and the foreign policies of the United States and China, with particular emphasis on China’s engagement with the UN system and emerging multilateral frameworks such as the AIIB, BRICS, and SCO. Her work has appeared in The Review of International Organizations, Global Policy, and The Pacific Review, among other journals. Her forthcoming book, The Exit of Hegemony? The Logic of U.S. Withdrawals from Postwar International Institutions, will be published by Shanghai People’s Publishing House in 2025.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://csgchku.wordpress.com/
