Category: Past Events

Speaker: Dr. Marta Rosa Bisceglia, Adjunct Professor and Research Fellow, University of Bologna

Discussant: Yeewan Koon, Associate Professor, Chair of Department of Art History, and Associate Dean (Global), The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Arts

Chair: Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor, The University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law

Date: October 23, 2025 (Thursday)
Time: 4pm-5pm
Venue: Room 723, 7/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong

The seminar will begin with a presentation of the European research project WRITE – New Forms of Calligraphy in China: A Contemporary Culture Mirror (国书法新形式：当代文化之镜, PI Prof A Iezzi). The project investigates how emerging forms of calligraphy in contemporary China are reshaping Chinese cultural identity. At its core, WRITE undertakes the first systematic analysis of these innovative artistic practices. By creating a comprehensive dataset of artworks and adopting a media-based categorization, the project explores the development of new forms of calligraphy across multiple creative domains, including fine and contemporary art, decorative and applied arts, architecture, performing arts, and graffiti art.

Within this broader framework, the seminar will focus on graffiti as one of the most dynamic and experimental areas where calligraphy is being redefined. Graffiti, a global art movement in constant evolution, emerged in China only in the mid-1990s. Despite being relatively underexplored, it has developed into a remarkably vibrant phenomenon, giving voice and vitality to the anonymous neighborhoods of the country’s vast metropolises. Chinese graffiti occupies a liminal space between legality and illegality, free street expression and commercial production, state endorsement and social critique, revealing both its unique local character and the complex cultural landscape of contemporary China.

In this context, Dr Bisceglia, a specialist in Chinese graffiti, a member of the WRITE project, and co-author of the book Graffiti in China, will advance the discussion by presenting her most recent research on the intersections between calligraphy and graffiti in China, and the emerging new era of Chinese graffiti.

This event is co-organized by the CILS of HKU Faculty of Law, Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) of HKU, and the School of Humanities of HKU Faculty of Arts.

For inquiries, please contact Ms. Grace Chan at mcgrace@hku.hk / 3917 4727. To learn more about The Centre for Interdisciplinary Legal Studies (CILS), visit https://cils.law.hku.hk/. 

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Roundtable Discussion
Rose Casey in conversation with Leila Neti, Shane Chalmers, and Daniel Elam

Speakers:
Rose Casey, Associate Professor of English, West Virginia University
Leila Neti, Irma M. and Jay F. Price Professor in English, Occidental College
Shane Chalmers, Assistant Professor, Faculty of Law, HKU
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (10:00 pm/21 Oct/Morgantown)
Venue: On Zoom

Across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, English-derived property laws are being transformed by writers as well as legal actors. In Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, Rose Casey analyzes vanguard legal actions and literary innovations to identify a pattern of anticolonial property law reforms in Nigeria, India, South Africa, and the English Atlantic. Describing these legal transformations as productively “improper,” and identifying a similar, aesthetic impropriety in postcolonial literary works, Casey shows that literature is involved in undoing property law’s colonial legacies. By reading fiction and poetry alongside landmark legal cases and instruments, Aesthetic Impropriety argues that both law and literature play vital roles in creating anticolonial world orders.

Rose Casey is associate professor of English at West Virginia University in the United States. She is author of Aesthetic Impropriety: Property Law and Postcolonial Style, published by Fordham University Press in 2025. Her scholarship has appeared widely in academic and public venues. She is working on her next book, Inheriting Dispossession: South African Succession Law and Literature’s Narrative Temporalities.

This event is co-organised by Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), Department of Comparative Literature, and the Faculty of Law, The University of Hong Kong.

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手稿年談張愛玲

分享嘉賓 Speakers:
Prof. Carole HF HOYAN 何杏楓 教授 (Department of Chinese Language & Literature, CUHK)
Prof. WONG Nim Yan 黃念欣 教授 (Department of Chinese Language & Literature, CUHK)
Prof. Rebecca LEUNG 梁慕靈 教授（School of Arts & Social Sciences, HKMU)

主持兼與談人 Moderators & Discussants:
Prof. Nicole HUANG 黃心村 教授 (Dept. of Comparative Literature, HKU)
Prof. LIN Pei-yin 林姵吟 教授 (School of Chinese, HKU)

日期時間 Date & Time: October 10, 2025 (Fri) 16:00-18:00pm (HKT)
語言 Language: Putonghua 普通話
地點 Venue: Level 2 Multi-purpose Area, Main Library, Main Campus, HKU
授課模式 Delivery Mode: Face-to-face & Online

摘要 Abstract:
張愛玲遺產繼承人宋以朗先生今年年初將宋家所藏的手稿和信件全數捐贈香港都會大學，堪稱壯舉。五位香港張愛玲研究者在張的農曆生日匯聚，漫談大批手稿的整理和呈現對於張愛玲研究的意義。何杏楓教授聚焦中學時代的張愛玲在聖瑪利亞女校年刊上發表的六篇英文作品，探討少作在整個創作生涯中的位置。黃念欣教授細讀《小團圓》手稿，描繪一個附文本的誕生，並提出未來開發張愛玲「筆跡學」的可能。梁慕靈教授從大量整理張愛玲手稿和相關資料的經驗出發，定義史料的多重構成，展望未來的研究方向。黃心村教授和林姵吟教授也將分享她們對於張愛玲手稿研究的心得和前瞻。「手稿年」的這場對談，我們也希望開放討論，聆聽三年來持續支持我們這個講座系列的聽眾的聲音。 

A landmark donation made by Dr. Roland Soong and Mrs. Elain Soong Kingman to the Hong Kong Metropolitan University early this year brought the importance of manuscript research to the forefront in Eileen Chang studies. Five Hong Kong scholars gather in this roundtable to share their newest findings. Carole Hang Fung HOYAN will focus on six English essays written by a teenage Chang and discuss their position in Chang’s entire writing career. WONG Nim Yan takes a new look at Chang’s fiction masterpiece Little Reunions and argues that its manuscript form presents an important paratext next to the printed text. Rebecca LEUNG draws from her experience working with a massive amount of Chang and Soong manuscripts to discuss what constitutes research material and to shed light on future projects. Nicole HUANG and Pei-yin LIN will co-moderate the roundtable and also share their most recent findings and reflections. We invite our audience members to participate in an open dialogue. 

講者簡介 About the Speakers:
何杏楓  香港中文大學中國語言及文學系教授、雅禮中國語文研習所所長。專著包括《重探張愛玲：改編‧翻譯‧研究》、《重訪中國現代文學：細讀‧數據‧接受》。最近關注「世界中」的中國現代文學，曾發表論文〈「把我包括在外」：張愛玲作為世界作家〉。其他與張愛玲相關文章包括〈錯置與暫借：張愛玲及其衣飾〉和〈最後，點心便在咖啡裏溶化：張愛玲的飲食〉等。 

Carole Hang-fung HOYAN is Professor of the Department of Chinese Language and Literature, and Director of the Yale-China Chinese Language Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She is the author of Re-investigating Eileen Chang: Adaptation, Translation and Research and Re-visiting Modern Chinese Literature: Close Reading, Data and Reception. She has recently focused on the study of the worlding of modern Chinese literature and has published various articles on Eileen Chang including “‘Include Me Out’: Reading Eileen Chang as a World Literature Author,” “Misplacement and Borrowing: Eileen Chang’s Clothing and Accessories” and “Finally, the Dim Sum Melted in the Coffee: Eileen Chang’s Food and Drink.” 

黃念欣 香港中文大學中國語言及文學系副教授、香港文學研究中心主任。著有《晚期風格︰香港女作家三論》、散文集《夕拾朝花》。最近研究女性文學與中額文化（middlebrow culture）的關係，對張愛玲的衣食住行與「物質性」深感興趣，曾發表〈食與寫——張愛玲散文中的飲食表述與邊緣性〉、〈一縷芳魂——張愛玲小說的配香筆記〉及〈張愛玲與香港的中額文化（Middlebrow Culture）〉等相關文章。 

WONG Nim-yan is an associate professor in the Department of Chinese Language and Literature and the director of the Hong Kong Literature Research Centre at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. She has recently focused on the study of middlebrow literature and has written on the materiality of Eileen Chang’s works in various articles including “The Marginality of Eating and Writing of Eileen Chang’s Essays”, “Notes on Perfume-pairing Eileen Chang’s Novels” and “Eileen Chang’s and Middlebrow Culture in Hong Kong”. 

梁慕靈 現為香港都會大學人文社會科學院副教授兼副院長（行政及發展）、田家炳中華文化中心主任。她畢業於香港中文大學中國語言及文學系，獲哲學博士、哲學碩士及榮譽文學士，亦持有香港大學學位教師證書。研究興趣為中國現當代文學、文化和電影理論及創意寫作教育，論文見於《清華學報》、《政大中文學報》、《中國現代文學》等學術期刊，並出版《華文創意寫作與跨媒體實踐》、《想像與形塑──上海、香港和台灣報刊中的張愛玲》、《視覺、性別與權力：從劉吶鷗、穆時英到張愛玲的小說想像》、《數碼時代的中國人文學科研究》和《博物館的變與不變：香港和其他地區的經驗》等專著。她曾以《故事的碎片》獲臺灣《聯合文學》第十六屆小說新人獎短篇小說首獎，並入選台灣九歌出版社《九十一年小說選》。作品散見香港和台灣的文學雜誌和報章，並於2021年由台灣聯經出版社出版小說集《戀人絮語02.21》。 

Rebecca LEUNG received her BA, MPhil, and PhD in Chinese from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and obtained Postgraduate Certificate in Education from the University of Hong Kong. She is currently Head of Creative Arts cum Associate Professor of the School of Arts and Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Metropolitan University and the Director of the Tin Ka Ping Centre of Chinese Culture. She has published numerous papers in renowned journals such as Tsing Hua Journal of Chinese Studies and Bulletin of the Department of Chinese Literature National Chengchi University. She also published books titled Chinese Creative Writing and Multimedia in Practice, Imagination and Shaping: The Newspaper Coverage of Eileen Chang in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, Visuality, Gender and Power: The Imaginations in Novels from Liu Na’ou, Mu Shiying to Eileen Chang and The Studies of Chinese Humanities in the Digital Era etc. Her research interests lie primarily in the area of Chinese modern literature, Chinese contemporary literature, cultural & film theory and creative writing. Apart from academic research, she is also enthusiastic about creative writing. She obtained the prestigious “Unitas Award for New Novelists” in Taiwan in 2002. Her new novel A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments 02.21 was published in Taiwan in 2021. 

This event is held as part of the New Directions in Eileen Chang Studies Lecture Series |
張愛玲研究新方向講座系列 
Co-hosted by School of Chinese and Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Co-sponsored by Louis Cha Fund for Chinese studies & East/West studies in the Faculty
& Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC)

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Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone

Speakers:
Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan, Assistant Professor of English, Rice University
Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Time: 10:00 am Hong Kong Time (9:00 pm/29 Sep/Houston)
Venue: On Zoom

Why is it so difficult to account for the role of identity in literary studies? Why do both writers and scholars of Indian English literature express resistance to India and Indianness? What does this reveal about how non-Western literatures are read, taught, and understood? Drawing on years of experiences in classrooms and on U.S. university campuses, Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan’s Overdetermined explores how writers, critics, teachers, and students of Indian English literatures negotiate and resist the categories through which the field is defined: ethnic, postcolonial, and Anglophone.

Ragini Tharoor Srinivasan is an assistant professor of English at Rice University. She is a co-editor of Thinking with an Accent (2023), author of Overdetermined: How Indian English Literature Becomes Ethnic, Postcolonial, and Anglophone (2025), and co-author of The End Doesn’t Happen All at Once: A Pandemic Memoir (2025). Her book of essays on collectivity, What is We?, is forthcoming.

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).

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Jack Halberstam, David Feinson Professor of Humanities at Columbia University and coeditor of the Perverse Modernities book series at Duke University Press, will share with us his experience of publishing with academic presses. For early-career academics, navigating the process from establishing initial contact with an editor, responding to reviewer reports, and revising the manuscript can be daunting. This workshop will demystify the process of book publication by sharing insights and strategies. Target participants are PhDs who just completed their dissertations and faculty members in the process of writing their first book.

Participants are strongly encouraged to submit a 2-page single-spaced prospectus of their book, including the book’s main argument, intervention, and potential audience and market. For further questions, please email Professor Alvin K. Wong at akhwong@hku.hk

Please submit your prospectus to Professor Wong by September 17, 2025, before 5:00pm.

Date: Wednesday, September 24, 2025 (postponed to Friday, September 26, 2025)
Time: 11:00 am to 12:30 pm

This event is co-organised by the Faculty of Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

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Speaker:
Jack Halberstam
The David Feinson Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University

Moderator:
Alvin K. Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Thursday, September 25, 2025
Time: 4:00 to 6:00 pm Hong Kong Time
New Venue: Room 3.04, 3/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In this talk, Halberstam will explore the meaning of trans embodiment using a vocabulary borrowed from a 1970’s art collective called ‘anarchitecture’. The work of Gordon Matta-Clark represents the spirit and the intentions of this group. Halberstam believes one should use the language of anarchitecture to describe trans embodiment for a few reasons: First, trans bodies should not become legible within the system of gender that was constructed around its exclusion. In other words, if trans bodies violate binary gender, then they cannot seek to become ‘real’ through that same binary. Instead, they must and do threaten to unbuild the binary, and take apart the version of trans that the binary produces. Second, because anarchitecture delivers a version of transness that does not seek to become a new vehicle for capital, it offers an alternative to the process by which once excluded groups become new markets. Rather than becoming a new platform for neoliberal marketing, the unbuilding of the body opens onto a critique of capital, real estate, and the realities that subtend them. And finally, trans bodies, like the buildings that Gordon Matt-Clark opened up, represent an unworld within which representational systems can and do come apart. The trans body that can be glimpsed through Matta-Clark’s anarchitectural experiments is not figure but ground, not body but landscape, not building but demolition site.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012), and a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam  is now finishing a book titled Anarchitecture After Everything, which will be published by MIT Press in 2026. Halberstam was the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton in 2022 and he was named a 2024/2025 Guggenheim Fellow. 

This event is co-organised by the Faculty of Arts, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), the Committee on Gender Equality and Diversity (CGED), and the Department of Sociology at the University of Hong Kong.

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Interactive Seminar

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.

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.

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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)

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.

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BOOK TALK

Speaker: Alvin K Wong, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Respondents:
Lucetta Kam, Associate Professor, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Travis Kong, Professor, Department of Sociology, HKU
Marco Wan, Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies, HKU
Harmony Yuen, Assistant Curator, M+
Jamie Zhao, Assistant Professor in Media and Cultural Studies, School of Creative Media, CityU

Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU

Date: Tuesday, September 2, 2025
Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time
Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU

In “Unruly Comparison,” Alvin K. Wong examines queerness in Hong Kong through a transdisciplinary analysis of Sinophone literature, cinema, visual culture, and civil society. Moving beyond Eurocentrism in queer theory and China-centrism in area studies, Wong frames Hong Kong as a model for global comparison by theorizing a method of unruly comparison—acknowledging the incommensurability of cultural texts and queer figures across different temporal and spatial locations. Here, unruly comparison positions Hong Kong as an undefinable time-space that troubles historicist, colonial, and China-centric renderings of the city as merely a site of British colonial legacy, Chinese rule, or global capital. By foregrounding the friction, asymmetry, and perverse juxtapositions of unruly comparison of Hong Kong with the Sinophone world, Wong reframes key debates in queer theory and East Asian studies.

Alvin K. Wong is Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. He is also the Co-Director of the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC). His research spans across the fields of queer theory, Hong Kong literature and cinema, Chinese literary and cultural studies, Sinophone studies, transnational feminism, and the environmental humanities. His book “Unruly Comparison: Queerness, Hong Kong, and the Sinophone” was published by Duke University Press in Spring 2025.

A 30% discount code E25AKWNG can be used when ordering “Unruly Comparison” directly from the Duke UP website: https://www.dukeupress.edu/unruly-comparison

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