

Cheng Chung Pong
Cheng Chung Pong is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focuses on the dynamics of contemplation and action in local literary field, fictions and urban planning, writing space and speech act of minority.
Tentative Research Topic
Hong Kong Literary Writers and Public Imagination in Post-handover Hong Kong: Fleurs des Lettres (Zihua) and The House of Hong Kong Literature
Research Interests
Hong Kong Literature and Culture, Public Culture, Cultural Production, Cultural Politics
Publication
〈香港文化中的視差視野:葉靈鳳掌故和董啟章《地圖集》的互文性〉,《方圓》2019年第二期,頁177–206。
〈時代、疾病與小說寫作:讀董啟章《心》〉,《聯合文學》2016年第376期,頁58–61。
Cheung Shui Yee
I am an MPhil student in Cultural Studies at CUHK. My project focuses on the intersection of leftist dissident movement and colonialism in Hong Kong's 70s. Through my research, I aim to reinterpret the colonial reality in Hong Kong as an institutional strategy maneuvered by multiple political forces in their border-crossing interactivities oriented to subverting or upholding regional hegemony. I will be studying the intellectual interexchange as well as international/regional activism in the late Fiery 70s of Hong Kong to go beyond the colonized/colonizer dichotomy and locate Hong Kong subjectivity in the dynamic undercurrent beneath the seemingly monolithic rule of colonialism.
Tentative Research Topic
The Fiery 70s in Post-Mao Transition: Dissident Left under China-Hong Kong Division System
Research Interests
Socialist Dissident, Left-wing Politics, Anti-Colonialism
Chung Hiu Yung
I am an MPhil student in Cultural Studies at CUHK. I focus on researching the cinema of Lou Ye, one of the prominent directors of the Sixth Generation of Chinese Cinema. I am interested in genre films such as film noir and melodrama, as well as the relationships between the individual and the state, the body and traumatic experience, as well as sources of film adaptation. I received my BA in English Literature at Durham University in the UK.
Tentative Research Topic
The Cinema of Lou Ye: the traumatised body and neoliberalism in postsocialist China
Research Interests
Film Studies (Film noir and Melodrama), Chinese Independent Cinema, Queer Theory
Feng Lei
Feng Lei is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He intends to explore how the "non-urban" sustains but also fundamentally disrupts the formation of urban subjectivity in everyday lives of central Beijing.
Tentative Research Topic
Non-urban space and experience in contemporary urban China
Research Interests
Urban culture, everyday life, psychoanalysis
Han Zhuyuan
I’m a PhD Candidate in Cultural Studies. I majored in Chinese literature during my undergraduate studies, and I obtained my Master’s degree in Critical Asian Humanities from Duke University, USA. For my PhD project, I am going to explore the relationship between the reading practice of Chinese urban women and the formation of their female subjectivity during the early twentieth-century. I’d like to investigate how the emergence of women as modern readers on the pages of public print media embodied their engagements with new norms and knowledge, as well as facilitating their feminist awareness, self-identification, and collective identity. I am also interested in studying how the image of “female reader” was developed and deployed by male intellectuals for various ideological purposes.
Research Interests
Modern Chinese print culture; Women’s studies and feminism; Media theory
Award
Publication
Conference Presentation
Hu Wenxi
I majored in Chinese literature during my undergraduate studies at the South Normal University of China. I obtained my MPhil degree in Chinese Contemporary and Modern Literature from the East Normal University of China. I am exploring the representation of human-waste experiences within a trans-media framework for my Ph.D. dissertation. Using "documentary mode" as an opening frame, I examine how photography, art, and poetry visualize environmental waste while facilitating the ambiguous relationship between waste and humans. By exploring what is at stake in defining waste and how these definitions of waste work for specific kinds of people, I am also concerned about how the representation of the human-waste relationship interacts with geopolitical relations, gender politics, and technical aesthetics.
Tentative Research Topic
Documenting/ Feeling waste: Documentary Mode and Environmental literature and films in Contemporary China
Research Interests
Environmental humanity, film and media studies, Chinese modern and contemporary literature and culture.
Conference Presentation
Publication
Award
CUHK Vice-Chancellor's Ph.D. Scholarship Scheme(2020-2023)(2020-2023)
Lim Chun Lean
Lim Chun Lean is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong whose interest lies primarily in the postcolonial condition in Southeast Asia. His current project reflects on the nature of multiculturalism in contemporary Malaysia and attempts to introduce spatial reasoning into the long-established racial constructionist approach, widely adopted by Malaysian scholars, to better understand the metaphysical composition, the cognitive processes, and the lived experience of Malaysian, as well as Southeast Asian, as a whole, derived from this theoretical rearticulation. Prior to his doctoral study, Chun Lean received his academic training at Nanyang Technological University and Lingnan University.
Tentative Research Topic
Inside Multiculturalism: The Trialectics of Race in Malaysia Conceptualized
Research Interests
Postcolonialism, Southeast Asian Critical Theories, Malaysian Studies, Vietnamese Studies, Race and Ethnicities
Lee Chi Shing
Lee Chi Shing is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His ongoing dissertation project aims to bridge up Hong Kong Studies and the Global Sixties by investigating the radical discourse of home from 1969 to 2021. It addresses a two-fold question: 1) how local activism in Hong Kong can be understood from the perspective of the global Sixties, and 2) how local activism in Hong Kong renews our interpretation of the global landscape of radicalism. Approaching the radical discourse of home as a local lens to interpret the global landscape of the Sixties’ radicalism, the dissertation project argues for an understanding of home that could articulate a more productive politics – not so much the xenophobic, exclusive, and defensive politics than the multifaceted, inclusive, and open-ended.
Tentative Research Topic
The Radical Politics of Home: the Radical Discourse of Home in the Sixties and Post-Sixties Hong Kong, 1969–2016
Research Interests
The Global Sixties, Left-wing Politics, Activism, Hong Kong Studies
Publication
(Accepted) ”The utopian homeland: New Left internationalism, diasporic Chinese nationalism, and anarchism in Hong Kong, 1969–1973”. The Global Sixties: An Interdisciplinary Journal.
Li Jinghui Issac
Li Jinghui is a PhD student in Culture Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research focused on the various spaces and events for tongzhi in Hong Kong. His thesis explores and scrutinizes the entanglements and issues within these flourishing tongzhi-scapes in terms of economy, sexual politics, materiality, and affect. He received his BA in Advertising from Shanghai University in 2018 and his MA in Creative Media from the City University of Hong Kong in 2019.
LI Jinghui is also a street photographer active in Hong Kong and mainland China. Inspired by nostalgic and analog photography, his photographs capture the everyday life of the ordinary and the sentimental scenes on the streets. Currently, he’s working on the project Oikwan with many other artists, which takes inspiration from Oi Kwan Barbers, a 60-year-old traditional Cantonese barbershop in Wanchai.
Tentative Research Topic
Somewhere over the rainbow: The politics and sexualities of tongzhi spaces in Hong Kong
Research Interests
Chinese Digital Video and Media Culture, Chinese Gender and Sexuality, Queer Theory, Media and Affect Theory
Li Yixiang
Li Yixiang is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at CUHK. His proposed dissertation focuses on modern Chinese poetry, in particular on its conception of voice. His project investigates how modern sonic technologies inspired the formation of poetic address in the history of Chinese literary modernity.
He received BA in English Literature at BNU-HKBU United International College and MA in East Asian Studies at University of Toronto.
Tentative Research Topic
The Technology of Articulation: Modern Chinese Poetry and its Sonic Imagination, 1917-1949
Research Interests
Comparative modern poetics; "writing as technology"; urban culture; fashion history.
Luo Haoxi
I am a PhD candidate in cultural studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research interests lie at the intersection of digital games, cultural memory and realism in contemporary China. My thesis project draws on the lenses of cultural studies, memory studies and game studies to examine realistic independent games and their play in the context of Mainland China. It analyses how the text of these games captures the structures of feeling within the changing and tense social reality and personal experience, and how the various practices associated with games, including production, promotion, playing, discussion, etc., shape and reshape the perceptions and memories of revolutionary war history, reform and opening era nostalgia, class, and gender.
Tentative Research Topic
Memory and Realism in Chinese Indie Games: History, Nostalgia, Class, and Gender
Research Interests
Independent Games, Cultural memory, Realism, Everyday Life, Popular Culture
Publication
Luo, Haoxi. 2022. “Games as Heterotopias: Realist Games in China”. British Journal of Chinese Studies, 12(2), 180-187.
Conference Presentation
Translation works
Eric Michael Peterson
Eric Peterson is a Ph.D. student in Cultural Studies at CUHK and received his B.S. at Towson University and M.A. at Yonsei University. His research interests span many areas in game studies, particularly the development of communities surrounding speedrunning and digital game modification. He also has a prior background in the cultural history of Korea and Japan.
Research Interests
Video Games, Digital Cultures, Cultural Industries, Science and Technology Studies, New Materialism, Cultural History of Korea and Japan
Pit Hok Yau
I am an MPhil student in Cultural Studies at CUHK. I am currently researching Hong Kong's animal history and discourses.
Research Interests
Environmental Humanities, Animal Studies, Hong Kong Studies
Commentary
Personal Page on Inmedia
https://www.inmediahk.net/user/533117/post
Quizon Juan Miguel Leandro
Graduate Fellow
(Asian Graduate Student Fellowship Program of the Asia Research Institute - National University of Singapore in 2015)
Juan Miguel Leandro Quizon is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is finishing his dissertation on spatial cultures of airports in archipelagic Southeast Asia focusing on monumentalism, mobilizations, and mobilities. His research interest includes urban spatial studies and popular media culture. He was a fellow from the Asian Graduate Student Fellowship Program offered by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore in 2015. He holds an MA in literary and cultural studies from the Ateneo de Manila University and a BSC in applied corporate management from the De La Salle University - Manila.
Short description
An athlete, classical pianist, and traveler who loves to shower in the rain
Tentative Research Topic
Architectonics of Archipelagic Southeast Asian Airport Cultures
Research Interests
Urban spatial cultures, popular culture and media
Tan Xuanxuan
Xuanxuan Tan is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong whose research is based in China. Her interests sit at the intersection of science and technology studies, biopolitics, and media studies. She holds an MPhil in Journalism and Communication from the Jinan University.
Tentative Research Topic
Anti-epidemic objects, culture, and power: A materialist study of China’s war against the pandemic
Research Interests
Science and technology studies, biopolitics, nationalism, affective publics and China's social media
Conference Presentation
Publication
Thesis Abstract
Affective “cultural technique:”
Tracing anti-pandemic technologies in China’s war against the COVID pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted health, economics, politics, culture, and society. Health codes, lockdowns, Reverse Transcription-Polymerase Chain Reactions, Personal Protective Equipment, vaccines, and statistics on cases tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 are anti-epidemic technologies being widely employed by the Chinese government and public health professionals to fight the pandemic. However, anti-epidemic technologies are marginalized research topics in cultural studies. Generally, they are assumed to be part of the scientific responses to the pandemic. How anti-pandemic technologies shape governance and their relations with political powers have not been adequately understood.
This project approaches China’s pandemic response by looking at media representations of and public attitudes toward anti-pandemic technologies. Semi-structured interviews, participant observation, thematic analysis, and discourse analysis are used to collect and proceed with data. Regarding anti-pandemic technologies as a “cultural technique,” my thesis studies anti-pandemic technologies by tracing the entanglement of anti-pandemic technologies, human perception, and media representations. It reveals how anti-pandemic technologies generate affect of the pandemic to mediate and adjust the effect of the Zero-COVID on population. Through generating affect of the pandemic, anti-pandemic technologies produce, weaken, and undermine political powers. They strengthen political powers by shaping the people’s risk perception, emotions, and national identity and generating bodily pain and discomfort. Political powers are weakened and undermined when anti-pandemic technologies create misinformation and uncertainty. The dynamics of anti-pandemic technologies show the complex interplay of culture and technologies in which the relations between culture and technologies the distinctions between object and performance, matter and form, signal and noise, emotion and body, and symbol and reality are in becoming, making the in-betweenness of human subjectivities beyond control and resistance paradigm visible. Focusing on the technical politics of China’s pandemic response, this research maps out the complex influences of anti-pandemic technologies on society, politics, and culture. Furthermore, it illustrates how to study technologies and emerging infectious diseases from an interdisciplinary perspective.
#keyword: COVID-19, anti-pandemic technology, cultural technique, affect, STS
Award
ICS Mok Hing Cheong Postgraduate Scholarship (2022/23)
Tang Sum Sheung Samson
Samson Tang is a Ph.D. candidate who is currently working on his dissertation on battle royale games, their cultural and emotional impacts, and player experiences. He also holds an M.Phil. on documentary films and affective ecocriticism.
A passionate gamer who plays Fortnite, PUBG, Arcaea, and A Dance of Fire and Ice. He also plays online Texas holdem and international chess.
Research Interests
Transgression in games, alternative play practices, media and emotions, global gaming industries, game policies and censorship in China
Tse Wing Tung Jamie
Tse Wing Tung Jamie is a PhD candidate in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research aims to dissect technologically-mediated player identity and agency, through a triangulation of race, gender, and sexuality, in video games and game narratives.
She received her B.A. and MPhil degrees in Comparative Literature from the University of Hong Kong. Her MPhil thesis investigates the dialogic relationship between romance as an allegory and identity in the context of Hong Kong Transitional Period (1982-1997).
Tentative Research Topic
‘Video games as Cultural Texts: Reinventing/Destabilizing Identity and Agency through Game Narratives’
Research Interests
Video game studies; Critical theory; Gender and sexuality studies; Postcolonial studies; Hong Kong literature and cultural studies
Publication
Kika W. L. Van Robays
Kika W. L. Van Robays (they/them) is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. They are from Belgium and from Hong Kong. Kika’s research focuses on zines, queer communities, the Sinophone/Sinosphere, and Transpacific connections. They grapple daily with the question of where one community starts and the other end, they emphasize tenderness and platonic affections above all. Kika is also a poet and the author of Let the Mourning Come with Prolific Pulse LLC (2022). They have an MA in Chinese Language and Culture (Ghent University) and in Gender and Diversity Studies (Flemish joint university program).
Tentative Research Topic
Queer/ing Zines across the Transpacific: On Connection
Research Interests
Queer & Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Sinophone Studies, Sinosphere Studies, Media Studies, Alternative Media Studies, Postcolonial Studies, and Critical Race Studies
Publication
2022: publication of Let the Mourning Come (poetry collection)
Award
The awardee of 2022 Hong Kong Association of University Women Postgraduate Scholarship
Wang Weihang
I came from a history background and I'm trying to put together an industrial history of Mao's Third Front (a secret national defense project initiated in 1965) in the hinterland of China's southwest. I'm interested in the relation between the Third Front, the (post/new) Cold War scenario, and the formation of the industrial rustbelt in southwest China. I'm also concerned with the environmental issues caused by the building of the Third Front and its lasting impact on the environment of the hinterland. I received my BA in history from the Ohio State University in 2016 and my MA in China Studies from the University of Michigan in 2018.
Tentative Research Topic
Industrial Landscape and Legacies of Mao’s China: Third Front Factories and Their Surrounding Environments
Research Interests
Industrial history and Cultural history of Mao's China; Environmental history; Third Front; Rustbelt and Ruins
Award
"The Practice of Urban Exploration in Investigating the Material and Visual Memory of China’s Old Industrial Towns." Best Paper Award. Online Postgraduate Conference in Humanities at Hong Kong Baptist University
Wong Ka Hei Cecilia
Wong Ka Hei Cecilia is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research examines how feminist and queer creators in Hong Kong use digital platforms for activism, collaboration and transformative social relation against the translocal network of manosphere. She received her MPhil degree in Gender Studies from CUHK and her Bachelor's degree in Communications (International Journalism) from the Baptist University of Hong Kong.
Tentative Research Topic
Queering Platform and Bodies: Gender, Feminist and Queer Digital Activism in Hong Kong
Research Interests
Gender Studies, Queer and Feminist Theory, Media Studies, Platform and Creator Studies, Activism, Affect, Hong Kong Studies
Publication
Jacobs, K., Cheung, D., Maltezos, V., & Wong, C. (2023). The Pepe the Frog Image-Meme in Hong Kong: Visual Recurrences and Gender Fluidity on the LIHKG Forum. Journal of Digital Social Research, 4(4), 130-150. https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v4i4.131
Award
The awardee of 2021 Hong Kong Association of University Women Postgraduate Scholarship
Wong Tak Yin
Wong Tak Yin is an MPhil student in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Their research, rooted in prior experiences in community organising, explores the diverse manifestations of asexuality within the socio-cultural landscape of Hong Kong. Walking queer, they seek to navigate the intricate dynamics between queerness, identities, and (a)sexual politics as they unfold in everyday life.
Tentative Research Topic
“Queering Asexuality in Hong Kong: Body, Affect, and Asexual Resonances”
Research Interests
Queer Theory, Gender and Media Studies, Affect, (A)sexual Politics
Yang Tian
Yang Tian is a PhD student in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. With previous background in art museums and galleries and an MA in Cultural Management, she tries to look at how Southern Chinese form their regional identity through contemporary art practices.
Tentative Research Topic
The Cultural Formation of Southern Chinese Identity in Contemporary Chinese Art: Focusing on Pearl River Delta and Guangdong Region
Research Interests
Chinese Contemporary Art, Curation, Art Criticism, Regional Identity, Cultural Identity, Internal Colonialism
Yu Nicole Alexis
Yu Nicole Alexis is an Mphil student in Cultural Studies in The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her current research is on Hong Kong Social Movement Documentaries (2014-2021). She received her BA in Journalism and Communication from The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2016.
Current Research Topic
Socially Active Recording: Meaning Making and Audience Reception of Hong Kong Social Movements Documentaries (2014-2021)
Research Interests
Media Studies
Media and Social Movements
Documentary Studies
Hong Kong Studies
Zheng Lin
I am a Mphil student in Cultural Studies and Gender Studies at CUHK. My background is Chinese language and literature(BA,Peking University). My Present research focus on Original Boy’s Love novel in mainland China. Other interests include: popular culture studies, gender studies, film and media studies.
Tentative Research Topic
Subjectivity Construction through Intimate Relationship Imagination in Original Chinese Boy’s Love Novel
Research Interests
Popular culture studies, gender studies, film and media studies.
Zhu Mengmeng
Zhu Mengmeng is a Ph.D. candidate in Cultural Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research is situated at the confluence of women’s representations, gender politics, and modern Chinese literature. She is also interested in Chinese science fiction.
Tentative Research Topic
Between Nationalism and Misogyny: Representations of Women in Discourse, Clothes, and Sports (1927–1937)
Research Interests
Urban Culture
Gender Politics
Chinese Science Fiction