2017 - 2019 REPORT
Institutional Development
Graduate Programs
The Institute has been an agile intellectual hub that offers a stimulating environment for academic training and scholarly interchanges, cultivating curiosity and interest in the humanities and social sciences. Our graduate programs have made great strides in recruiting and nurturing young talents while embracing diversity.
I. Graduates and Alumni
Our students come from Hong Kong, mainland China, the rest of Asia, Europe, and the United States. In 2017–2019, we were tremendously happy and proud to see some of our brightest students complete their research work at the Institute and move onto new chapters in their career.
Some of these graduates have remained in the academia: Mr. Peter Tam currently works at Hong Kong Baptist University’s History Department. Dr. Fabian Winiger (2018) is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Zürich, where he now works on the intersection of spirituality and global health at the World Health Organization. Mr. Graham Link is serving at the Centre for International and Professional Experience (CIPE) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Ms. Song Ah Lee successfully defended her thesis in the summer of 2019 and received a fellowship from the Central European University in Budapest to pursue a Master of Public Administration degree starting September of the same year. Both Mr. Linzhou Xing and Ms. Yishan Zhong have remained at HKU to assist with research work.
List of Our Graduates from 2017:
Name (Degree, Year of Graduation) |
Thesis Title |
|---|---|
Peter Tam |
Advocacy of Chicken Poultry in Republican China (1911–1949): History of a Modern Food Industry |
Ryan Xie |
Pilgrims to Prosperity: Business Trajectories and Networking Strategies of sub-Saharan African Women Traders in Guangzhou |
Qi Sun |
Reluctant “Maocare”: the Shaping and Practice of the Rural Healthcare System in the Wenzhou Region (1949–1978) |
Fabian Winiger |
Curing Capitalism: “Zhineng Qigong” and the Globalisation of Chinese Socialist Spiritual Civilisation |
Song Ah Lee |
Postpartum Care and Motherhood in Contemporary South Korea: A Study on Sanhujoriwons |
Graham Link |
Mosuo Kinship and State Civilisation: Making “Quality” Family in Southwest China |
Jingyi Tian |
Redefining the “Self” through Martial Arts — Ethic, Honor, and Moral Bodies in Transnational Kendo in Hong Kong |
Yishan Zhong |
Mothering with Mobile Communication Technologies in Urban China |
Linzhou Xing |
Technological Choices of Chinese Taxi Drivers under E-hailing: Conventional Occupation Groups under the Impact of Digital Automation and Post-Fordism |
James Wright |
Technowelfare in Japan: Personal Care Robots and Temporalities of Care |
II. Current Students
We have also welcomed a new group of students in the past few years. Currently, ten students are carrying out MPhil and PhD studies at the Institute.
Mr. Martin Tse was admitted to our MPhil Program in 2019–2020. He is interested in researching religion and society in Asia, and is now formulating his thesis project provisionally titled “An ethnographic and textual study of the ‘Attack on Hell’ Daoist ritual among the Lanten Yao in Laos,” under the supervision of Dr. David A. Palmer and Dr. Kam Wing Fung.
Ms. Joyce Fung was admitted to our MPhil Program in September 2017. She is working on her thesis “An Ethnographic Study on the New Age Movement in Hong Kong” under the guidance of Dr. David A. Palmer and Dr. Izumi Nakayama.
Ms. Zichan Qiu joined the Institute in September 2017. She is now working on her MPhil project entitled “A Hakka Village of Malaysia: The Form of Communal Identity and Chinese Culture Identity of Senai New Village.” Her project is jointly supervised by Dr. David A. Palmer and Dr. Ji Li.
Mr. Zhongxian Xiao is completing his MPhil thesis “Legal Management of Suspicious Death in Modern Shanghai, 1860s–1920s,” under the guidance of Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung and Dr. Izumi Nakayama, for viva to be held in spring 2020. He considers the Institute “a great platform to get access to various academic resources.”
Mr. Wenbing Wu received his first master’s degree in sociology from Tsinghua University in Beijing, and obtained his MPhil degree in social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology in 2019. He joined the Institute in September 2019, and is currently working on his PhD with Prof. James Kai-sing Kung and Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung. He is interested in historical sociology and social history in China, and his research focuses on the quantitative analysis of the collapse of the Qing Empire in China.
Admitted to the Institute’s PhD Program in 2018, Mr. Yichen Rao currently works on his thesis provisionally titled “Trusting Strangers with Big Data: Credit, Morality and Power on China’s P2P Lending Platforms” under the guidance of Dr. Tom McDonald and Dr. David A. Palmer. He received a dissertation fieldwork grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation in May 2019 for his project.
Mr. Xiaomeng Liu, PhD student, said, “The Institute fosters interdisciplinary studies and provides an excellent platform for academic exchange. Scholars and students from diverse backgrounds gather here and form an intellectually inspiring and productive community. ... Courses offered by the distinguished visiting professors also give students more exposure to the research agendas and methods from around the globe.” Mr. Liu is completing his thesis “Medicinal Marketplaces: Commerce and Cultures of Knowledge Production in the Qing and Republican China” under the supervision of Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung and Dr. Izumi Nakayama.
Ms. Shuo Hua, PhD student, is working hard on the final stage of her PhD studies. As she completes her PhD thesis “A Mobile Art World: Exhibiting and Dealing Modern Chinese Ink Paintings in Hong Kong, 1945–1984” under the supervision of Dr. Florian Knothe and Prof. Angela Ki Che Leung, she has also taken up the challenge to co-teach, as an intern, a course on Chinese art, offered by the Academy of Visual Arts of Hong Kong Baptist University, in fall 2019.
Ms. Anna Iskra is completing her PhD thesis provisionally titled “Healing the Nation through Self-Discovery: Mainland Chinese New Age Milieu and the Politics of ‘Psy-venting’” for viva to be held in early 2020. In the past few years, Ms. Iskra has learned quite a lot from her primary supervisor Dr. David A. Palmer, as well as other faculty members and distinguished scholars at the Institute. She believes that “the guiding principle of HKIHSS is truly humanistic — in both research and teaching it goes beyond artificial divisions between disciplines, connecting researchers of various interests and backgrounds.”
Ms. Andrea Chen is working on her PhD thesis on a part-time basis, primarily under the supervision of Dr. Kam Wing Fung with Dr. Ji Li. She is interested in Nestorianism, and her thesis is provisionally titled “Re-configuring the Yelikewens — New Research on so-called Nestorian Crosses.”