Team
Prof. Robert Bickers, Centre Co-Director
Robert Bickers is a historian of colonialism, in particular of the British Empire and its relations with China and the histories of Shanghai, Hong Kong, and modern Chinese history. He has authored eight books and countless articles on the British in China, and overseen numerous projects including the Hong Kong History Project and Historical Photographs of China. Robert Bickers is Professor of History at the University of Bristol and is currently working on a new research project covering the history of Hong Kong.
Dr. Vivian Kong, Centre Co-Director
Vivian Kong is Lecturer in Modern Chinese History at the University of Bristol. Born and raised in Hong Kong, Vivian received her BA and MPhil from the University of Hong Kong, and completed her PhD at Bristol in 2019. Since her PhD she has worked closely with Bristol's Hong Kong History Project. Her research to-date has focused on Hong Kong and its transnational connections, and she has published on migration, identities, and civil society in interwar Hong Kong. Her first book, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong 1910-45 (forthcoming with Cambridge University Press), explains the long history of engagement that the multiracial residents of Hong Kong have made with Britishness, and how this affects identity formation in the city today.
Prof. Ray Yep, Centre Research Director
Ray Kin-man Yep is a historian specialising in the political economy of China's reforms, late colonial governance of Hong Kong and contentious politics. He has published in leading peer-reviewed journals and has authored multiple books on Hong Kong studies. Ray has held visiting positions in Bristol University, Peking University, University of Macau, Brookings Institution and Academia Sinica. He is also active in public service and has served in the Central Policy Unit, Advisory Council for Environment, and Strategy Subcommittee of Sustainable Development Council in Hong Kong.
Dr. Thomas M. Larkin, Augustine Heard Fellow
Thomas Larkin is a historian of China and the US, specialising in the ways transimperial contact, culture, race, gender, and national identity shaped and were shaped by interactions in colonial and semi-colonial spaces. His work experiments with scale, and with the applications of digital humanities methods. He has just completed his forthcoming book, The China Firm: Elite Americans and the Making of British Colonial Society (Columbia University Press), and his current work is focused on mapping the expansive Sino-foreign socio-commercial networks that were fabricated along the China coast in the nineteenth century.
Postgraduate Researchers
Alex Cheung
Alex Cheung's research interest lies in urban space and society of Asian port cities, especially where the British Empire and the Chinese diaspora met. He is currently researching the transformation of ordinary dwelling space in early twentieth century Hong Kong, in particular the Chinese tenements. By doing so, he seeks to explore the lived experience and identity of the tenement dwellers as well.
Phyllis Chan
Phyllis Chan is a doctoral candidate researching British subjects of Chinese descent in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Her project considers the development of colonial citizenship and nationality, imperial state knowledge, and the transnational networks and mobility of Chinese across imperial domains, particularly in Hong Kong. More widely, she is interested in issues of nation, race, and ethnicity in the imperial context, as well as mobility and migration within and across imperial borders. She is also keen to explore ideas about the colonial archive and materiality to reflect more deeply on the writing of imperial and colonial history as a whole.
Lamia Lung
Lamia Lung's research focuses on Hong Kong migration and cultural history, exploring family linkages, social and political interconnections, transnational identity formation, as well as the impact of Hong Kong diaspora on the development of Hong Kong history and society. She is most interested in the study of individuals and families, and the experiences of Hong Kong women. Her research also considers the interaction between Hong Kong and British culture. She has research interests in transnational history, migration, gender, ethnicity, multiculturalism, and Hong Kong-British relations.
Wai Li Chu
Wai Li Chu's thesis examines the Sino-British negotiations on Hong Kong's future in view of their political and economic connections with other countries such as the United States and Australia during the late Cold War. His research interests go beyond these relations between decolonisation and Cold War in the process and outcome of a colony's decolonisation to the wider issue of the history of the late British Empire.
