Socity of Fellows in the Humanities (2020-2023)

I N TR O D U C ING OU R 2020 -202 3 FELLOWS

Society of Fellows in the Humanities The Society of Fellows in the Humanities is a prestigious new initiative that attracts exceptional, early-career, post-doctoral scholars from around the world to the University of Hong Kong. Located in one of the world’s most dynamic cities and on Mainland China’s doorstep, HKU offers unique opportunities to engage in cutting-edge research through its commitment to innovation and interdisciplinary.

The 2020-2023 Fellows come from globally renowned institutions, including Yale University, Brown University, University of Sydney, University of Oxford and Harvard University. They will be contributing to a vibrant research community and interacting with acclaimed scholars from across all humanities disciplines.

Faculty of Arts The Faculty of Arts is one of the University’s oldest and largest faculties and is consistently recognized as one of the best in Asia for the Arts and Humanities. The Faculty contributes to knowledge development through outstanding scholarship and education. It provides a comprehensive, humanistic, and liberal research environment, a highly internationalized academic staff, and a strong culture- and language-based curriculum.

The Faculty is a recognized center of research excellence in fields that include Asian Cinema, China Studies, Chinese Philosophy, Art History, History, Law and Literature, Linguistics and Post-colonial Literatures, and is active in fostering partnerships globally and exploring new means of facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration.

Welcome from thE Dean

Once again I am delighted to welcome this year’s cohort to the Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Each new fellow brings an exciting project and set of intellectual concerns to the Society. Since its inception, the Society has attracted several outstanding cohorts which have been nothing short of exceptional in their vibrancy, intellectual dynamism, and in the inspiring contributions they have made to the Schools and Departments within the Faculty and to the University of Hong Kong. Many of the fellows in previous cohorts have already received tenure-track and related jobs in Asia or Europe, some even before the term of their fellowship was completed. With such a talented group and the first-rate experience they have enjoyed within the Faculty, these are the kinds of successful outcomes we are working to ensure for every fellow. May I wish our new cohort an equally auspicious beginning to what we can guarantee will be an exciting and productive journey with us.

Professor Derek Collins Dean Faculty of Arts

Message from thE Director

A unique initiative in East Asia, HKU’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities provides a much-needed space for research and scholarly exchange free from formal requirements and disciplinary constraints. This year, we have once again recruited from all over the world five among the best young scholars working in the arts & humanities. As I write this, they are already busy laying out research plans and organizing lecture series, symposia, or special events–all open to the public. Unfolding at a crucial time for higher education in Hong Kong, the Society of Fellows in the Humanities consolidates the role of HKU’s Faculty of Arts as a global incubator of innovative research.

Professor Giorgio Biancorosso

Professor, Department of Music Director, Society of Fellows in the Humanities

CathErine Culvahouse Fox PHD, YALE UNIVERSITY

Catherine Culvahouse Fox specializes in the literary and dramatic traditions of the Caribbean in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

At the Society of Fellows in the Humanities, Fox is focusing on her manuscript, tentatively titled Christophe’s Ghost. In it, she explores a phenomenon whereby mid-twentieth-century Caribbean writers experimented with the genre of tragedy as a tool for political thinking.

These writers, including Aimé Césaire, Derek Walcott, and Alejo Carpentier, looked to the past to create new philosophies of resistance and alternative histories through the figure of the Haitian king Henry Christophe (1767-1820). Her second book project, Transnational Debates in the Golden Age of Caribbean Theater, 1949-1969 charts a most singular moment in West Indian drama during the period surrounding the short-lived West Indies Federation.

Fox completed her PhD in Comparative Literature and African American Studies at Yale University in 2020. While at Yale, she also enjoyed teaching from the art collection as a Wurtele Gallery Teacher at the Yale University Art Gallery. Beyond her interest in the Caribbean, her research spans literary theory, the childhood memoir, surrealism, postcolonial theory, metahistory, the usable past, and the long Harlem Renaissance.

Claire Gullander-Drolet PHD, BROWN UNIVERSITY

Claire Gullander-Drolet writes and researches on translation, transpacific cultural production, and the environment. She earned her PhD in English from Brown University in 2019 and was a visiting assistant professor at Clark University during the 2019-2020 academic year. Her writings have appeared in The Journal of Transnational American Studies, Resilience: A Journal of the Environmental Humanities, Another Gaze: A Feminist Film Journal, and The Asia Literary Review.

At HKU, Claire will complete work on her first monograph, The Politics of Impurity: Asian/American Environmental Fiction and the Transpacific Turn.

This project examines a body of contemporary Asian/American literature and film that mobilizes interlingual translation as a heuristic for the temporality of environmental crisis. Reconsidering such crucial events as the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, and the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” The Politics of Impurity argues that the histories of the transpacific are not limited to human conflict, but encompass violent encounters among nonhuman animals, material objects, and ecosystems as well. Through close readings of work by Ruth Ozeki, Karen Tei Yamashita, Han Kang, and Bong Joon-ho, this project considers how transpacific authors and filmmakers approach the representational problem of environmental slow violence through moments of translational failure, mistranslation, or deferral. Situating the erasure of transpacific slow violence within the context of discourses of US national purity, The Politics of Impurity argues that these cultural producers reclaim impurity as a generative category, one that can recuperate marginalized histories and dilate space for imagining alternative political and environmental futures.

Linus Huang PHD, UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY

Linus Huang is a philosopher of cognitive science, technology, and artificial intelligence. He received his PhD in History and Philosophy of Science from University of Sydney and held postdoctoral fellowships at Academia Sinica, Taiwan and University of California, San Diego. Linus’s research programme explores the implications of computational cognitive neuroscience on the nature of agency and the human mind. His research has been published in Synthese, Philosophical Psychology, and Philosophy & Technology.

His dissertation, Neurodemocracy: Self-Organization of the Embodied Mind, focused on the problem of control: despite significant progress in understanding the neural mechanisms involved in specific cognitive functions, it remains unclear how these diverse neural mechanisms are coordinated to generate coherent and intelligent behaviors. His project argues that a hybrid account of control that incorporates insights from both embodied and classical cognitive architectures is the view best supported by empirical research. As an upshot, it provides an alternative perspective on self-control and implicit bias that is distinct from contemporary theories of agency.

At HKU, Linus will conduct a new research project entitled ‘Engineering Equity: How AI Can Help Reduce the Harm of Implicit Bias’. Implicit bias—when one unintentionally acts on the basis of stereotypes or prejudice concerning social identities (ethnicity, sexuality, class)—causes harm. Therefore, reducing implicit bias is a key issue in promoting social justice. Current approaches on how to intervene largely assume a dualistic framework that studies cognition detached from its bodily and environmental contexts. However, their shortcomings can be rectified by incorporating insights from embodied approaches. With this embodied perspective, we open up a large area of the solution space for promising interventions that can accelerate social progress.

His project will expand AI’s potential for promoting equity, contributing to debates in philosophy of mind, psychology of implicit social cognition, and critical technology studies.

PETE MIllwOOD DPHIL, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

Pete Millwood researches the international and transnational history of the Chinese world during the Cold War. His first book-length project is a history of people-to-people diplomacy in the US-China rapprochement of the 1970s. Under contract with Cambridge University Press, the book examines the role of Americans and Chinese outside of government in the rebuilding of the relationship between the two societies and states. Based on new sources collected from more than a dozen official, non-governmental, and private archives, from across China and the United States, it argues that a broader and more diverse cast of actors than previously recognized—musicians, scientists, journalists, and performing artists—were as central to the transformation in US-China relations as were diplomats such as Henry Kissinger and Zhou Enlai. Pete's research has been published in Diplomatic History, the Journal of Contemporary History, and the Washington Post, among other places.

Pete received his DPhil degree in History from St Antony’s College, Oxford and then held postdoctoral fellowships at Tsinghua University's Schwarzman College and Oxford's Rothermere American Institute. He was an LSE Fellow in East Asian History at the London School of Economics for two years before moving to HKU. During his doctorate, he undertook fieldwork through research fellowships at Peking University and the Library of Congress. He holds an MSt in Global and Imperial History from Oxford and a BA in International History from LSE and studied Chinese on a government scholarship at National Taiwan University's ICLP programme.

DYlan SuHER PHD, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

Dylan Suher is a scholar of modern Chinese literature and media. He received his PhD and MA in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from Harvard University. His research explores ideologies and definitions of popular culture, the development of media practices within and across national boundaries, and the postsocialist legacies of socialist institutions of cultural production. His current book project, tentatively titled “Getting Electrocuted”: Media and the Author in Postsocialist China,” investigates how writers in the People’s Republic of China during the Late Reform Era (1989–2012) used media to represent the existential challenges facing their profession and the institution of Chinese literature. At a time when their livelihood and cultural status was under siege from the pressures of state divestment, marketization, and global cultural flows, these writers used audiovisual media—both symbolically and literally, through engaging in television and film production—to express their ambivalence toward a new media ecology that simultaneously offered opportunity and precarity.

While at the University of Hong Kong, Suher intends to build on this project by examining the early internet circulation of the countercultural writer Wang Xiaobo, and the shared aesthetics of “worker poetry” and independent documentary. He will also pursue new research projects in late 1980s Chinese television theory and production, and the problem of length in contemporary Chinese literature and media.

Apart from his scholarship, Suher writes essays and reviews on Chinese literature. His work has been published by The White Review, Popula, and most frequently in the journal Asymptote, for which he serves as a contributing editor. He was an assistant editor of (and contributor to) A New Literary History of Modern China (Harvard University Press, 2017).

He sees translation and essays introducing Chinese literature to a popular audience as an important extension of his more formal academic work.

Run Run Shaw Heritage House The Fellows have taken up residence in Run Run Shaw Heritage House from 2017. The building was constructed in 1923-1924 and was originally used as Senior Staff Quarters for the site managers of Elliot Pumping Station and Filters, Water Supplies Department. In 2009, it was listed as a Grade II Historic Building by the Antiquities and Monuments Office.

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