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Meet the Hong Kong Faculty

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Faculty in Residence

Each quarter, one Stanford professor serves as Faculty in Residence in each of the BOSP program locations. These faculty teach classes in their own disciplines, developing courses that incorporate unique features of the local culture and environment or that provide comparative perspectives on a particular topic. View a list of current and future faculty.

Local Faculty

Toru Horiuchi

Toru Horiuchi is Lecturer in the Global Studies Programme, Faculty of Social Science. He received his MA from Georgetown University and PhD from the University of Hong Kong. Prior to his appointment at CUHK, he served as a research fellow at the Japanese Consulate in Hong Kong. His primary research interests include Sino-Japanese relations, Chinese foreign policy, and security issues in East Asia.

Tak Sang Hugo Ip

Hugo Ip is Lecturer in the Department of Economics. He received his MPhil and PhD in Economics from The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include Financial Economics, Capital Markets and Investment.

Jan Kiely

Jan Kiely is Professor and Associate Director of the Centre for China Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Chinese history and research methods. 

Since first encountering China as a high school student in Chengdu in 1982-83, Kiely has studied Chinese language, culture and history at Yale (BA East Asian Studies), the University of Hawaii at Manoa (MA History), and the University of California, Berkeley (PhD History), and as a student and teacher in China at the Central China Normal University in Wuhan, Nanjing University, and Beijing University. Kiely previously taught also at Harvard University and Furman University, and directed Furman study programs at East China Normal University in Shanghai and Suzhou University. From 2007 to 2010, he was Co-Director and Associate Professor of the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University Centre for Chinese and American Studies. A former Yale-China Fellow, Beijing University Fellow, and National Committee on U.S.-China Relations Public Intellectuals Program Fellow, Kiely has served as a trustee of New Asia College (CUHK) and of the Yale-China Association and currently is a fellow of C.W. Chu College (CUHK) and serves on the Advisory Committee of the Universities Service Centre for China Studies (CUHK) and the Executive Committee of the Hong Kong Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Hong Kong.

A historian of modern China, Kiely is the author of The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901-1956 (Yale 2014), and co-editor of Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850-2015 (Brill 2015) and Recovering Buddhism in Modern China (Columbia 2016) and is a recipient of the CUHK Faculty of Arts Research Excellence Award (2015).

Jin Lei

Jin Lei received an MS in Statistics and a PhD in Sociology from the University of Chicago. Before joining CUHK she was a post-doctoral fellow at the Robert Wood Johnson Scholars in Health Policy Program at Harvard University. Her overarching research interest lies in the interplay of health, medicine and social systems. She has published in journals such as Demography, Social Science & Medicine, Social Science Research and Health Affairs, among others. Jin's work falls into two areas: the social determinants of health and the social organisation of health care. In the first area, she has examined how people's social relationships are linked to their health-related outcomes. She has published papers assessing how marital status affects the utilisation of health care and how local and trans-local social ties influence rural-to-urban migrants'mental health by shaping their social comparisons. She is also interested in delineating how structural inequality affects individual health through psychosocial pathways. In her current projects, she is investigating how relative social status, status inconsistency and social mobility influence health, the consequences of migration for psychological well-being and the health effects of contextual social inequality in China. In the area of social organisation of health care, she has studied patient-doctor interaction in the US and the changing patterns in the use of Chinese medicine in China. Her on-going project focuses on professional autonomy among physicians in China's public hospital reforms.

Chen Li

Chen Li is Assistant Professor at the Centre for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK). He is also Research Fellow (by courtesy) at CUHK’s Lau Chor Tak Institute of Global Economics and Finance (IGEF). He has researched and written extensively on issues related to China’s economic development, business environment and public policies, such as China’s state-owned enterprise reform, financial regulatory reform, government-business relations as well as industrial and regional development policies. He was invited to serve as a speaker or discussant by Harvard University, Brown University, UC Berkeley, Australian National University, National University of Singapore and Nanyang Technological University as well as Bank of America Merrill Lynch and Korea International Trade Association. Before joining CUHK, he worked at Fung Global Institute and Sun Hung Kai Properties Group in Hong Kong. He graduated from Peking University with dual bachelor degrees in law and economics. He received his MPhil and PhD in Development Studies from University of Cambridge. His recent book China’s Centralized Industrial Order: Industrial Reform and the Rise of Centrally Controlled Big Business was published by Routledge (London and New York) in 2016. He received 2018/19 ECS Grant from the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong.

Gordon Mathews

Gordon Mathews has written or edited books about what makes life worth living in Japan and the United States, about the global cultural supermarket and the meanings of culture today, about the Japanese generation gap, about what it means to “belong to a nation” in Hong Kong and elsewhere, about how different societies conceive of happiness, about Chungking Mansions as a global building, and about low-end globalization around the world. He is currently writing books about African traders in Guangzhou, about asylum seekers in Hong Kong and the global treatment of asylum seekers, and about the meanings of life after death in the United States, Japan, and China, and how these shape people’s lives before death. Over the past year, he has written papers on anthropology in East Asia, on happiness and neoliberalism in Japan, and on how to smuggle goods past customs in China. Mathews is really happy to be an anthropologist because the discipline enables him to investigate so many different topics. Anthropology is incredibly fun because so many different things in this world can be explored!

Jing Song

Jing Song is Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Programme. She got her BA and MA in sociology at Peking University (China) and then an MA and PhD in sociology at Brown University (USA). Her research interests include gender, family, work, migration, urbanization, political participation, and market transition. Her research cover topics of women's self-employment and entrepreneurship, land development and property rights, dating, cohabitation and marriage, tied migration and family relations. She has published in China Quarterly, Urban Studies, The China Review, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Housing Studies, Population, Space and Place, Journal of Sociology, Journal of Chinese Sociology, Journal of Comparative Family Studies, Asian Anthropology, Chinese Journal of Sociology etc. Her book Gender and Employment in Rural China was published by Routledge in 2017.

Tim Summers

Tim Summers works on China’s politics, political economy, and international relations. In addition to his role as a senior consulting fellow on the Asia-Pacific Programme at Chatham House, Tim is Assistant Professor at the Centre for China Studies, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Tim has presented at numerous academic and policy research conferences, spoken on developments in China to corporates and at investment conferences, given evidence to the British parliament’s foreign affairs committee, been interviewed by Bloomberg, CNBC, the BBC and Sky News, and published numerous media commentaries. Prior to taking his PhD, Tim was a British diplomat for 13 years, including a posting as consul-general in Chongqing from 2004 to 2007, and work in Hong Kong from 1996 to 2001. He speaks both Cantonese and Putonghua.

Lynn Lin Sun

Lynn Lin Sun is a cultural anthropologist. Her research interests lie in how various intimate experiences are articulated in a close and complex interaction between humans and their environments, and how discourses can become affective and thus “move” people. Using the experience-near approach, she has explored this theme in her current research project on how “marital happiness”—a set of dominant warm and fuzzy logics—is constructed and experienced by married women living in urban China and Japan today. She is now working on turning this piece of research into a book manuscript.

Before teaching at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Lynn was a visiting research fellow at Waseda University. She was also part of the U.S.- China Research Group on Culture and Common Good initiated by the Georgetown University. Lynn now teaches both undergraduate and MA courses on intimate relationships, gender, and popular culture.

Kristof van den Troost

Kristof van den Troost completed an MA in Sinology at the Catholic University of Leuven, and a PhD in Chinese Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he is now Assistant Professor at the Centre for China Studies. His main research interests are Chinese film history, genre studies, and the representation of crime in Hong Kong cinema. He has a forthcoming publication on Hong Kong Crime Films: Criminal Realism, Censorship and Society 1947-1986.

Francesco Vecchio

Francesco Vecchio is Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He is also an adjunct research fellow in the Centre for Law and Justice at Charles Sturt University. He was previously a post-doctoral research fellow in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the same university. His research interests span across several disciplines with a focus on mixed migratory movements, irregular border crossing and informality. He is part of the expanding network of researchers and non-government organizations gathered at Monash University’s Border Crossing Observatory.

Yuk Ying Sonia Wong

Sonia Wong obtained her PhD in Cultural Studies at Lingnan University in 2017, and now teaches Gender Studies at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include lesbian identity, female sexuality, film, new media and local history.

In 2013, she founded Reel Women Hong Kong, the first and only independent film festival in Hong Kong devoted to the promotion of female-created films and art works, as well as gender equality and awareness, in society. In 2018, she founded the first Women’s Festival in Hong Kong with Eaton HK and Sally Coco, aiming at further popularising gender consciousness and diversity.

Apart from being an activist and academic, she is a poet, writer, and visual artist. Her writings on gender and sexualities are frequently featured in local media.

Suk-Ying Wong

Suk-Ying Wong received her PhD from Stanford University. She was on the teaching faculty in Japan before joining The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1997. Her primary interests involve the sociology of education, organizations and higher education, and much of her research and writing have related to the role of education in the construction of modernationalism and identity formation. Her work has appeared in journals such as the American Sociological Review, Sociology of Education, Comparative Education Review, and Multicultural Education Review. 

Professor Wong has an active record of professional and community service. She was the former Chair of the board of Management, Joint University Programmes Admission System, a member of the Joint Committee on Student Finance, Working Family and Student Financial Assistance Agency, and a Subject Specialist for the Hong Kong Council for Accreditation of Academic and Vocational Qualifications. By invitation, she was Honorary Guest Professor with the School of Ethnology and Sociology, Minzu University of China (2005). She was also the former Co-President of the Comparative Education Society of Asia.