Speaker:Winter Jade Werner, Associate Professor of English, Wheaton College
Moderator:Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
How do we see more clearly the non-Western intellectual labor embedded in popular Victorian fiction? This talk proposes “citation chaining” as an archival methodology for that project, tracing how the penanggalan—a Malay vampiric figure—traveled from Abdullah bin Abdul Kadir’s 1819 description in a missionary periodical through colonial print networks to Bram Stoker’s research notes for Dracula, unattributed.
Winter Jade Werner is Associate Professor of English at Wheaton College and Visiting Scholar at Universiti Malaya. She is the author of Missionary Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ohio State UP, 2020), and her book in progress traces the entanglements of British missionary print culture and Victorian ideas of “world literature.” Her work is forthcoming or appears in ELH, Victorian Studies, Comparative Literature, and MLQ.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker:Christina Bezari, Senior Post-doctoral Fellow, University of Brussels
Moderator:Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Wednesday, April 8, 2026 Time: 12 noon Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
Recent studies have theorized the Mediterranean as a privileged site for the study of literary and geopolitical interactions in the twentieth century. Despite these advances, Southern Europe and the Maghreb have often been studied in isolation and have occupied a “peripheral” position with regard to the more “dominant” centers of political power. The main objective of this lecture is to shed light on Southern European and Maghrebi women’s participation in transnational anti-colonial and anti-fascist movements by analyzing their contributions as writers, journalists and editors of periodicals. Long regarded as “marginal actors” in the public sphere, women’s participation in the press and in transnational networks of solidarity has been obscured due to a long history of censorship, colonial domination and dictatorial rule on both sides of the Mediterranean. By considering women as cultural mediators and agents of resistance within a comparative, trans-Mediterranean framework, this lecture aims to challenge traditional Eurocentric narratives and examine women’s texts as sites of political engagement.
Christina Bezari is a senior post-doctoral fellow at the University of Brussels (ULB). Her research is located at the intersection of comparative literature, Mediterranean studies and women’s history. She is the author of Transnational Modernity in Southern Europe: Women’s Periodicals and Salon Culture (Routledge, 2023) and the co-editor of the special issue “Latinity and Modernity: Cultural Identities and Transnational Exchange in a Globalizing World” (2025). Her research focuses on transnational networks of writers, editors, translators and cultural mediators in Southern Europe and the Maghreb. She has previously co-directed an international project on the “imaginaries of translation” at Sorbonne University (Paris-IV).
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Eileen Chang’s fiction is often characterized by a tone of bleakness, and she herself frequently gives the impression of being cold, pessimistic, and lonely. Yet she deeply loved comedy. From childhood, she was fascinated by Hollywood feature and animation films, even fantasizing about learning animation production. She regarded the cinematic medium as a luminous solace amidst chaotic era. She wrote about 20 screenplays for MP&GI, mostly romantic comedies, with elements of Hollywood screwball comedy. These works injected lively energy into Hong Kong’s Mandarin films of the 1950s and 1960s, gaining popularity throughout the Chinese-speaking world. Eileen Chang’s comedy scripts deliberately avoided the bleakness found in her fiction, using instead witty dialogues and happy endings that fully revealed the playful, optimistic, and endearing side of her inner self. In a letter to her close friends Stephen and Mae Soong, she wrote: “I’m so glad you laughed at it,” showing pure joy. This unexpected aspect of her work not only comes from her personal passion for cinema, but also challenges the traditional Chinese cultural emphasis on tragedy. The comedies written by Eileen Chang allow us to rediscover her multifaceted charm.
講者簡介 About the Speaker: 河本美紀 日本大阪大學語言文化學博士，現任教於九州大學、福岡大學。主要研究領域為華語文學與華語電影。著有《張愛玲的電影史》（印刻出版社，2025）、《張愛玲的映畫史》（關西學院大學出版會，2023）。學術論文曾收錄於林幸謙主編《張愛玲：傳奇・性別・系譜》、陳子善編《重讀張愛玲》等專書。目前從事香港文學研究，論文包括〈香港中的日本：近年香港文學中的集體記憶〉（刊載於《野草 增刊號 香港文學特集》，2026）。譯有麥樹堅〈千年獸與千年詞〉（收錄於青野繁治監修《擴散的語言：當代華語文學選集》，朋友書店，2025）。
Dr. Miki KAWAMOTO obtained her Ph.D. in Language and Culture, Osaka University, Japan. Currently, she is teaching at Kyushu University and Fukuoka University. Her main research areas include Sinophone literature and film. Her published works include Film History of Eileen Chang (INK, 2025), Film History of Eileen Chang (Japanese edition) (Kwansei Gakuin University Press, 2023). Her academic contributions include papers in Lim Chin Chown (ed.), Eileen Chang: Legend, Gender, Genealogy, and Chen Zishan (ed.), Rereading Eileen Chang, among others. Currently she is engaged with research on Hong Kong literature. Publications in this area include “Japan Inside Hong Kong: Collective Memory in Contemporary Hong Kong Literature” (Yaso, Special Issue: Hong Kong Literature Feature, 2006), and a translation of Mak Shu-kin’s “The 1000 Beasts and the 1000 Words” (in Spreading Words: A Modern Sinophone Literature Anthology, supervised by Shigeharu Aono, Hoyu Shoten, 2025).
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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Speaker: Tamara Chin, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature, Brown University
Moderator: Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 26, 2026 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
The study of language contact lacked prestige in traditional Philology. In China and Europe, philologists partitioned the past into distinct national languages. This talk asks how historical interactions across languages became a recognized modern research object. It revisits the discovery in Dunhuang of a multilingual cave library of ancient texts, and examines the post-Opium War and Cold War politics through which linguistic experts made language contact meaningful.
Tamara Chin is an associate professor of comparative literature at Brown University and author of Savage Exchange: Han Imperialism, Chinese Literary Style, and the Economic Imagination (Harvard 2014; trans. 野蛮交换：汉帝国的扩张、文学风格与经济想象 forthcoming); and The Silk Road Idea: Ancient Contact in the Modern Human Sciences, 1870-1970 (forthcoming 2026).
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Discussants: Georgios Halkias, Glorious Sun Professor in Buddhist Studies & Director, Centre of Buddhist Studies, HKU Catherine Hardie, Assistant Professor in Buddhist Studies, Centre of Buddhist Studies, HKU Crystal Kwok, Lecturer and Filmmaker, Department of History, HKU
Moderator:Ji Li, Associate professor, Department of History, HKU
Date: Friday, March 20, 2026 Time: 2:30-5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: LE1, (Library Extension), Main Campus, The University of Hong Kong
The award-winning 2023 documentary Ani Bond: Choying Drolma follows the inspirational journey of the “rock-star” Nepali nun Ani Choying Drolma. Fleeing an abusive father, the thirteen-year-old Ani sought refuge in a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where the nuns taught her to sing. Her stunning voice captured the attention of a visiting American musician who brought her singing to global attention. Ani Choying Drolma has used her international fame to campaign for girls’ education and, in 2000, she established a modern school for novice nuns, Arya Tara, in Kathmandu. Several of the girls, who come from some of the poorest and most remote areas of Nepal, share their stories in the documentary. Despite her achievements, the trauma of Ani Choying’s past continues to haunt her and, in an effort to confront it, the film sees her fulfill her father’s dying wish and travel to his hometown in Qinghai, China.
Directors Fen Jennifer Lin and Shan Bai spent seven years bringing Ani Choying Drolma’s astounding story to the screen. The documentary won the NETPAC Award for the Best Asian/Pacific Film and the Audience Award for Documentary at the 39th Warsaw International Film Festival, as well as Best Documentary Feature and Best Music and Sound at the 13th China Academy Awards of Documentary Film. Bai Shan is an independent director and producer. Fen Jennifer Lin is a media sociologist and a documentary filmmaker. She is Professor of Media and Communication and serves as Associate Vice President (Global Strategies) and Director of ArtX Hong Kong Institute at the City University of Hong Kong. She has written extensively and bilingually on media and political communication, information governance, state-society relations, China’s technology and innovation system, and social and cultural change. She obtained her BA in Economics from Peking University, MS in Statistics, and PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. For more on the film, visit https://youtube.com/@f.jenniferlin5671?si=9gMhkL1v_rQN942Q
This event is held as part of the course GLAS2141: Women and Gender in Asia, with the support of the Department of History, the Committee on Gender Equity and Diversity (CGED), the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC), and the Centre of Buddhist Studies 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://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker: Emily Yu Zong, Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University
Discussants: Kwai-Cheung Lo, Professor and Department Chair of Humanities and Creative Writing, Hong Kong Baptist University Winnie Yee, MALCS Programme Coordinator, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Tuesday, March 17, 2026 Time: 4:30 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room MBG07, G/F, Main Building, HKU
In Planetarity from Below, Emily Yu Zong questions the coloniality of modern freedom by examining migration as an ecological process. Through a translocal analysis of migration literature and film across Australia, North America, and China, she shows how these works reimagine freedom not simply as individual assimilation but as unruly and collaborative survival with animals, waters, minerals, waste, and technology. Moving environmental ethics beyond individual morality, Zong advances a worldmaking method of planetarity from below—attending to everyday, situated, and borderland ecological “doing” and “commoning” that widen cracks in modern colonial systems to reveal a migrant cosmopolitics beyond human exceptionalism.
Emily Yu Zong is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research focuses on Asian diasporic literature, environmental humanities, media theory, and science and technology studies. She is the author of Planetarity from Below: Decolonial Ecopoetics of Migration and Diaspora (University of Michigan Press, 2026 – visit the UMP website for a 30% discount – code UMWEB30) and co-editor of Decolonial Asian Diasporic Ecocriticism, a forthcoming special issue of ARIEL.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker: Sean Meighoo, Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature, Emory University
Moderator: Alvin K. Wong, Associate Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 5, 2026 Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Room 436, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
In Postcolonial Derrida, Sean Meighoo argues that Derrida’s philosophical work offers us an incisive engagement with the issues of colonialism, race, migration, and diaspora that distinguish postcolonial theory as such. Critically reading some of Derrida’s most famous texts in addition to some of his lesser-known ones, Meighoo brings Derrida into conversation with a diverse range of anticolonial and postcolonial thinkers and writers from the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia as well as African American and French feminist thinkers and writers including Toni Morrison, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, Hélène Cixous, V.S. Naipaul, Nelson Mandela, M.K. Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sean Meighoo is Associate Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at Emory University. He is author of The End of the West and Other Cautionary Tales (Columbia UP, 2016) and Postcolonial Derrida (Edinburgh UP, 2026). Meighoo’s work has also appeared in the journals Small Axe, Cultural Critique, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, Humanimalia, Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Journal of World Philosophies, and Derrida Today, as well as in the volumes Nation Dance: Religion, Identity, and Cultural Difference in the Caribbean (Indiana UP, 2001) and Beastly Morality: Animals as Ethical Agents (Columbia UP, 2015).
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Moderator:Crystal Kwok, Department of History, HKU
Date: Thursday, March 5, 2026 Time: 4:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: MB217, 2/F, Main Building, The University of Hong Kong
Emma Pei Yin is an Australian-Chinese writer and editor. Her debut novel, When Sleeping Women Wake, has been published globally, translated into multiple languages. It was longlisted for the ARA Historical Novel Prize (2025) and shortlisted for the Australian Indie Book Awards (2026). The novel follow the lives of three women caught up the turmoil of the Second Sino-Japanese War: the First Wife of the Tang family, Mingzhu, who leads a sheltered and lonely existence in Shanghai, her daughter Qiang, and her devoted maid, Biyu. In 1941, they flee to Hong Kong, but when the Japanese army invade, the three women are scattered.
Emma Pei Yin explores how histories of sex work, sexual coercion and gendered labour are often lived not through clarity or explanation, but through pressure, routine and silence—particularly in wartime contexts. Drawing on her novel When Sleeping Women Wake and the work of writers including Iris Chang, Lisa See, Jing-Jing Lee, and Lynn Bracht, Emma will examine how shifts in daily life and relationships can function as historical clues rather than missing pieces of the record. The workshop will discuss different approaches to representing sexual violence and coerced labour, including the use of restraint, implication and attention to consequence. There will also be a short, low-pressure writing and reflection exercise that invite participants to think carefully about how history first shows up in ordinary life. No prior writing experience is required, and participants are not expected to share their work.
This workshop is held as part of the course HIST2219: History through Sex Work, with the support of the Department of History, the Committee on Gender Equity and Diversity (CGED), and the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong. Emma Pei Yin appears courtesy of the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Speaker: Stephen Legg, Professor of Historical Geography, University of Nottingham
Moderator:Daniel Elam, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature, HKU
Date: Friday, January 30, 2026 Time: 5:00 pm Hong Kong Time Venue: Faculty Lounge (Room 430), 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, HKU
In this presentation, I will reflect on my past, recent, and future work exploring the geographies of colonialism and anticolonialism. I will open with a summary of my 2007 book, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities, which explored three landscapes of ordering which united New and Old Delhi as the capital of British rule in colonial India. I will also reflect on the intellectual moment from which this work emerged (geographer’s engagement with the latter-Foucault, postcolonial theory, and urban studies). Second, I will summarise my 2025 book, Spaces of Anticolonialism, which complements and supplements the first work, by exploring spaces of anticolonial struggle in Delhi in periods of protest mass-movement but also in everyday spaces of political mobilisation. Here, I reflect on ongoing debates regarding geographies of “resistance,” the decolonial, and the nature of the city. Finally, I will share ongoing research regarding the synergies between global urban history and global urban studies, and ask what “anticolonial urbanism” might be, what it could contribute, and how we might explore it comparatively between South, Southeast and East Asia.
Stephen Legg is Professor of Historical Geography at the University of Nottingham. His research centres on the geographies of late-colonialism, with a particular focus on British-Indian relations in the interwar period. His monographs include Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2007); Prostitution and the Ends of Empire: Scale, Governmentalities and Interwar India (2014); Round Table Conference Geographies: Constituting Colonial India in Interwar London (2023); and Spaces of Anticolonialism: Delhi’s Urban Governmentalities (2025). He is currently editor-in-chief of the Journal of Historical Geography.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
Film Screening & Post-Screening Discussion “Dream Home”
Film: Dream Home 維多利亞壹號 Date: 22 January 2026 (Thursday) Time: 18:30 – 21:30 Hong Kong Time Venue: Rayson Huang Theatre, Main Campus, HKU 香港大學黃麗松講堂 Guest Speakers: Josie Ho 何超儀, Conroy Chan 陳子聰
Moderators: Dr. Derek Lam 林瀚光博士， Dr. Fiona Law 羅玉華博士
Language (Post-Screening Discussion): Cantonese 廣東話
Please note: This film is classified as Category III and is restricted to persons aged 18 or above.
About the Film Cheng Lai-sheung (played by Josie Ho), who comes from a poor family, dreams of one day living in a luxurious high-end residence. The upscale development “Victoria One” is her ideal home. To afford an apartment there, she works multiple jobs and even risks selling her company’s confidential information. After great effort, she finally manages to pay the deposit, but the seller withdraws the property from the market after prices rise again. When she sees her lifelong dream of home ownership shattered, Lai-sheung snaps and embarks on a brutal, bloody campaign of revenge… Trailer: https://youtu.be/s0GyWR0XxNo?si=tR0vnHrD79-AqhNZ
The event is co-organized by the Department of Comparative Literature, the MA in Literary and Cultural Studies (MALCS), the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures (CSGC) at the University of Hong Kong, and MOViE MOViE.
For updates on future events hosted by the Center for the Study of Globalization and Cultures, please visit https://www.csgc.hku.hk/
