Editor’s note: This interview took place in 2021. Amba Tyrie (Amba): Is your book entitled The Unwalled City related to Kowloon Walled City? Xu Xi: Yes, I borrowed the title from the idea of the Walled City, as I grew up when the Walled City was still around—so the idea of ‘unwalling’ was the way…
Category: research
“Representing AIDS in China” by Serene Ng Yeuk Shu
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Ruth Y. Y. Hung “Not now! No one’s around to take pictures. Next week, we’ll book our best photographer: If every plasma station’s being shut down, a head must roll… This…
Announcement: Tammy Lai-Ming Ho Named Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews
Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho (何麗明) has been named Visiting Scholar at the University of St Andrews, the third-oldest university in the English-speaking world. She will be working with Professor Gregory Lee, Founding Professor and Head of the Department of Chinese Studies at the university, on the research project “A Cultural History of the People’s Republic…
Announcement: Benedict Rowlett Awarded ECS Research Grant
We are very pleased to announce that Dr. Benedict Rowlett has been awarded an Early Career Scheme research grant (HKD 273,178) from Hong Kong’s University Grant Council for his important and much-needed research project entitled “A Linguistic Landscape Study of the Gay Games in Hong Kong”. Huge congratulations! Dr. Rowlett shares here on Agora about…
“Writing and Rewriting” by Ivan Delazari
Holding a copy of the book you have written in your own hands is, in a sense, a creepy experience. Creepy in a good way, of course—excuse my oxymoron. You might feel the urge to flip through those pages to check if what’s there is really yours—to recognise those evenly printed lines as the ones…
“Preface to Poetry in Pedagogy: Intersections Across and Between the Disciplines” by Dean A. F. Gui & Jason S. Polley
The image opening this book about “intersections” is an eponymous poem in the shape of a frangipani flower. “Intersections” is one editor’s humble (and humbling) attempt at navigating an online text manipulation generator, which required manually trackpad-drawing the desired mosaic. The poetic montage textually and visually showcases the cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary praxes of poetry, pedagogy,…
“Image, Text, Image & Text, and Other Textual Innovations: A List of Books” by Jason S Polley
Editor’s note: On Thursday 26 November 2020, Dr Jason S Polley took part in the discussion “Ekphrasis City Poetics: Art and Text“, which was part of this year’s One City One Book Hong Kong programme, focusing on Xi Xi and her novel My City specifically. The event was a collaboration with the Hong Kong-based literary…
Announcement: Professor Sirkant Sarangi @ HKBU
The Department welcomed Professor Sirkant Sarangi (Aalborg University) to Hong Kong Baptist University for Department of English’s Research Postgraduate Seminar Series on “Exploring Professional/Health Communication through Discourse Analysis: Research Topics and Methods” (9-11 January 2020). Sponsored by the University Grants Committee, the HKBU Department of English Language and Literature, and the Master of Arts in…
“On Xi Xi” by Tammy Lai-Ming Ho
Short speech delivered on Thursday 7 March 2019, at the 2019 Newman Festival (7-8 March 2019, University of Oklahoma): First, I must say that I am very honoured to be invited to be one of the jurors of the Newman Prize for Chinese Literature 2019, focusing on poetry. I didn’t need to think twice in…
“I Am A Girl” by Coco Chan
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Jason S Polley I am a girl. I was born a girl. My biological traits tell me I am a girl. So, unless I undergo sex reassignment surgery, my sex…
“A Passage to Genre: Fictional and Non-fictional Genres in E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India and The Hill of Devi” by Kit Yeung
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Professor Stuart Christie The following analysis charts specific interactions between fictionality and non-fictionality as they approach the zone where putative fictionality and non-fictionality become coextensive. In this experiment, I will take…
“From the Victorian Vampire to the Contemporary Vampire” by Horace Tam
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho The Vampire and its Reflections on Victorian Society After the discussions of the vampire figures in three Victorian vampire fictions, including The Vampyre, Carmilla, and most importantly,…
“A Creative Exegesis of Liberality and Marriage in Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale” by Zarah Tong
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Professor Stuart Christie An excerpt 63———Before I start, allow me to explain: 64—–I love to share, silent not to remain. 65—–Experience of love, I don’t have much, 66—–The previous I guess…
“Beneath the Umbrellas” by Louis Chung
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho Beneath the Umbrellas: Cantonese as the Symbol of Hongkong Identity, Freedom and Weapon against Corrupted Language Language is human beings’ most important asset. It is the primary…
“Memory, Misremembering and Nonplace” by Chau Cheuk Man Charmaine
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho Memory, especially personal memory, serve as a source in the construction of “nonplace” and the re-imagination of history. Memory is derived from personal experience. It contains details…
“Avatar as Self” by Mignon Chiu
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Jason Eng Hun Lee Avatar as Self: the Politics of Jouissance in Natalia Figueroa’s Fran Bow (2015) and Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass and…
“Cyber-Realism in Practice” by Lam Man Tsun
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Jason S Polley Borders that divide our world have largely been eliminated these days, the result of globalisation. In “The Masses: The Implosion of Social Media”, Jean Baudrillard demonstrates the…
Announcement: Tammy Ho Lai-Ming Appointed Advisor to The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing
Dr Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (何麗明), an Associate Professor at the Department of English, has been appointed an advisor to The Leeds Centre for New Chinese Writing (利茲大學當代華語文學研究中心). The Centre is based at the University of Leeds and it is run by a managerial committee, assisted by an international Advisory Board. It organises talks, readings, workshops, symposia and…
“Umbrellas and Bottles” by Stuart Christie
Foreword I’m delighted to announce the publication of an important volume from the University of Mississippi Press, Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty Twenty-First-Century Approaches, which includes an essay of mine about teaching Eudora Welty in Hong Kong, with direct and attributed input (discourse, photos, storyboards, and images) from some remarkable young people who helped me…
“English in Hong Kong: Usage and Attitudes: A Survey” by Robert Fuchs
We are interested in when people in Hong Kong use English and what their attitudes to using English in certain contexts are. If you live in Hong Kong, no matter your level of English, nationality, origin and birthplace, we invite you to share your opinions with us and complete the survey at http://bit.ly/HKEnglish2018. The survey is…
“The Archive of Asian Sounds in English Poetry: First Recordings” by Lian-Hee Wee
For much of the world touched by the cultural spread of English that began with the age of exploration in the west to the rise of the United States following the Second World War, the language of prestige is a twisted dilemma of what is foreign and what has become also indigenised. Students of English…
Announcement: Outstanding ENG and ENGED students 2017-2018
Congratulations to these outstanding ENG and ENGED students! Pictured here with Professor Lian-Hee Wee (ENG), Dr Tammy Ho Lai-Ming (ENG) and Professor Johnny Poon (Acting Dean, Faculty of Arts). The Outstanding Students Presentation was held on Friday 29 September 2017 to recognise Arts Faculty’s high-achieving students with awards in outstanding academic performance, outstanding achievement, outstanding…
“Gender Studies Concentration” @ HKBU
Gender Studies Concentration (GSC) at Hong Kong Baptist University is the first of its kind in Hong Kong. It consists of 21 units co-offered by the Faculty of Arts and the Faculty of Social Sciences. GSC aims at delivering a unique opportunity for students to add breadth to their major studies, through being exposed…
Announcement: Jessica Yeung Wins Postgraduate Bursary of the British Comparative Literature Association
In May this year, Jessica Yeung submitted an application to the British Comparative Literature Association Postgraduate Bursary scheme for attending the conference “World Literature and Global Core Texts”, to be held on 26-27 June 2017 in the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). She applied for this scheme because she was encouraged by another…
Announcement: The Seventeenth Workshop on Cantonese
日期: 2017 年 4 月 22 日 (星期六) 地點: 香港浸會大學, 思齊樓, 719 主題: 粵難粵學 Date: April 22, 2017 (Saturday) Venue: David C. Lam Building (DLB) 719, Hong Kong Baptist University Theme: The Teaching and Learning of Cantonese as an Additional Language “The Seventeenth Workshop on Cantonese” will take place on April 22, 2017 (Saturday) at…
“The Broken One” by Naterlie Ip, by Christy Leung, Leo Lau and Charis Yeung
Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from a longer adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie (1944). . (Laura stands at the centre of the stage. Tom and Amanda enter the stage and stand at either sides of Laura. All three solemnly face the audience. Amanda is spotlit.) Amanda: It was the first and last time…
“Comics and Graphic Narratives; or, The Art of the Matter” by Jason S Polley
The fourth-year English course “Comics and Graphic Narratives”, a title as ambiguous as, say, “Short Stories and Novels”, and even the more equivocal “Prose Fiction”, is organised into several unstable thematic groupings: underground comics (or comix), revisionist narratives within the mainstream, memoirs & confessionals, new journalism, and auteur comics. The texts most recently selected for…
“A Secret About a Secret About a Secret” by Tammy Ho Lai-Ming
Jo Shapcott’s poem “Myself Photographed” begins with an affirmative statement: “So this is me.” This line draws our attention to the subject of the photograph, although it does so with a slightly wry, or perhaps uncertain, tone provided by the word “So.” The next line, “In the field after we got lost,” continues this tone,…
“Who Speaks?: From Self-Fictionalising Authors to Empowered Readers” by Janet Lau
The HP Series showcases excerpts from excellent Honours Projects by students from the Department of English Language and Literature. [Read all entries here.] Supervisor: Dr Tammy Lai-Ming Ho You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller. ― Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller…
“Mu Dan and Ambiguity” by Candy Wang
Mu Dan’s (1918-1977) poems, while incorporating elements and sentiments of classical Chinese poetry, also exhibit characteristics of Western modernist aesthetics and thoughts. For example, his poetry was influenced by William Empson (1906-1984), and this influence partially ushered Mu Dan’s shift towards Modernism. Perhaps the most significant impact of Empson on Mu Dan’s poetry was the…
Department of English, Hong Kong Baptist University 