A speech given at the Opening Ceremony of the Academic Week on 31 October 2016 Professors and student representatives, good afternoon. On behalf of my cabinet, I am delighted to have you here to participate in this Academic Week hosted by the English Language and Literature Society. The theme of this year’s Academic Week focuses…
Category: research
“The Surrealist Art of Remedios Varo” by Anna Tham
Remedios Varo’s interest in nature draws on the idea that it inspires us to think of the world in relation to instinct and spirituality and that it also represents the part of the human mind which is not normally known—the unconscious, as represented in the universal emotions stimulated by the concept of nature. Adam Adamski…
A Reading of C.P. Cavafy’s “Candles” by Nicola Chan Oi Ching
“The Penitent Magdalen” (detail) by Georges de la Tour C.P. Cavafy in “Candles” (1984), regarded by himself as ‘one of the best things [he] ever wrote’ (Cavafy qtd. in Liddell 139), transforms the abstract conception of daily birth of life into a metaphorical image of a row of candles, in which the first-person persona’s past and…
Announcement: Ivan Delazari wins Best Graduate Student Essay competition held by the International Society for the Study of Narrative
Returning to Hong Kong after his June tour of two public lectures in St. Petersburg and international conference appearances in Helsinki and Amsterdam, Ivan Delazari submitted his essay, “Diegetic Music: Who Is Listening, and What Is Heard?”, to the Best Graduate Student Essay competition held by the International Society for the Study of Narrative (ISSN) as…
Announcement: Robert Fuchs awarded the Richard M. Hogg Prize
Robert Fuchs, new Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, will be awarded the prestigious Richard M. Hogg Prize of the International Society for the Linguistics of English (ISLE) for his paper entitled “Near-Mergers in Postcolonial Varieties of English – The /v/-/w/ Contrast in Educated Indian English”. Robert will receive the prize at the annual…
Announcement: Stuart Christie appointed Editor-in-Chief of Literature Compass
Stuart Christie, Head and Professor of the Department of English Language and Literature, was recently appointed by international publisher John Wiley & Sons as Editor-in-Chief for its international academic journal Literature Compass. Stuart is pleased with the appointment, he said: “I’m very grateful for the opportunity a reputable publisher like Wiley has given me to help…
Announcement: Ruth Hung Received the Faculty/School Performance Award for Young Researcher
Dr Ruth YY Hung (洪如蕊) has been given the Faculty/School Performance Award for Young Researcher by Professor Franklin Luk, Vice-President (Academic) on 29 April 2016. (April 2016)
Announcement: Six ENG students presented their Hon Pro research at the Community College of City University
On Thursday 21 April 2016, six students from the Department of English presented their Honours Project research at the Community College of City University. The presentation was part of a two-day annual student conference held on the CityU campus, organised by Derrick Stone. Chan Man Kwan Ashley Hui Hon Man Herman Kwok Wai Yin Olivia…
Announcement: Zabrina Lo awarded CY Tung Scholarship to join Spring 2016 voyage of Semester at Sea
Pictured: Zabrina Lo (right) with Jason S Polley, who recommended Zabrina for the scholarship Zabrina Lo (English Language and Literature, Year 3), co-editor of Department of English’s Edge: HKBU Creative Journal and the First Prize Winner of the English Poetry Contest 2015, has been awarded the CY Tung Scholarship to spend a semester on the…
“A Creative Response to the 3rd Movement of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony” by Holden Liang Qichao, with Ivan Delazari
I saw a movie, in cold blue and dark grey colors (film-noirish, dark palette, like at dusk but with no street lights or any artificial light). A woman was running through a labyrinth of streets, looking like Hong Kong (small alleys, lots of cables and laundry lines, the ground wet), with her face towards us, the camera moving backwards in…
“Julia” by Stuart Christie
Julia, you recall, was Winston Smith’s great love in George Orwell’s 1984. She is both a character in the book and, at least for me, an emblem of what disinterested love itself can, and often does, result in just prior to the moment of capture, just prior to the moment the repressive secret police (of…
Alumni News: Viggo Cheng
Viggo Cheng (鄭浩輝), BA, English (Class of 2012)/MA, Language Studies (Class of 2014) has been awarded a postgraduate student assistantship to pursue PhD studies in Sociolinguistics at Georgetown University in Washington, DC. Renewable for up to five years, the assistantship (covering tuition and health insurance) will allow Viggo to pursue research in his areas of…
“The Controversy of “We are All Chinese”” by Ruth Y.Y. Hung
《無間道-「我想要回身份」》, 磁漆布本 Infernal Affairs, “I want my identity back”, enamel paint on canvas, 100cm(H) x 150cm(W), 2007 [Via.] Nearly two decades after the Handover of 1997, the PRC and its SAR HK have not come closer though the latter has become increasingly dependent on the booming mainland economy. Early this year, the 34-year-old local star Ella…
“Conference Reflections: The 22nd Annual Conference of the English and American Literature Association” by Jessica Siu-yin Yeung
. My Paper A look at literature will show readers that many literary texts deal with characters’ incessant quest for happiness through various means. A prime example is Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998). By making special reference to Mrs Dalloway written by Virginia Woolf in 1925, Cunningham uses her novel to link the quests for…
“What is Professional Discourse?” by Kenneth Kong
The following is from the first chapter of Professional Discourse: What does it mean to be a professional? What does a professional do to distinguish themselves from laymen and other professionals? To many people, being a professional means a degree from a medical school, many years of experience in an occupation or even just an…
“Intersection Collaborative Learning Project” — A Showcase of the Best Works (with an introduction by Heidi Huang and Holden Liang Qichao)
This month, students from the English Department’s Master’s programme in Literary and Comparative Studies (MALCS) joined the students from the undergraduate course Hong Kong Stories (taught by Heidi Huang) in an “Intersection Collaborative Learning Project”. The collaborative field trip which they undertook throughout Hong Kong was inspired by local modernist writer Liu Yichang’s short story…
Announcement: Kenneth Kong’s Professional Discourse Published
Dr Kenneth Kong has recently published his monograph, Professional Discourse, with Cambridge University Press (2014). Using a wide range of professional genres (such as research papers, business reports, performance commentaries, guidebooks and legal documents) Professional Discourse focuses on the discourse of professional writing, employing analytic paradigms from systemic-functional linguistics, pragmatics, text analysis, sociology and anthropological…
“Zhang Longxi on World Literature” by James Au
I first heard of Professor Zhang Longxi in Dr. Heidi Huang’s lecture. She introduced his article “The True Face of Mount Lu: On the Significance of Perspectives and Paradigms”, which I found truly impressive. In that article, Zhang mentions the importance of not analysing anything from only one perspective and suggests one trying to read from…
“The Institute for World Literature 2014 at the City University of Hong Kong: A Reflection” by Heidi Huang
The IWL organisers and the MALCS participants: From right to left: IWL local assistant Jiang Zhuyu, MALCS student James Au Kin-pong, MALCS lecturer Dr. Heidi Huang Yu, IWL Assistant director Dr. Delia Ungureanu, IWL Director Prof. David Damrosch, MALCS students Candy Li Yalin and Yolander Tang Yingying This summer, I was fortunate enough to attend the…
Announcement: James Au Awarded the Monbukagakusho Scholarship
James AU Kin Pong (MALCS, Class of 2014) has been awarded the prestigious Monbukagakusho Scholarship (MEXT) by the Japanese government as administered by its Hong Kong consulate. A highly competitive award requiring three rounds of interviews, the MEXT scholarship funds an entire course of PhD study at an institution of higher learning in Japan, pending…
“Reflections upon my Conference Presentation at the ICAH 2014 – Sri Lanka” by Jayantha Wannisinghe
The topic of my presentation at the ICAH (International Conference on Arts and Humanities) in Sri Lanka was “The Exclusivity of Sri Lankan Feminine Identity in Nihal De Silva’s The Road from Elephant Pass”. This presentation was an attempt to create an international dialogue on the exclusivity of Sri Lankan feminine identity as portrayed in…
Announcement: Ruth Hung Appointed Advisory Editor of boundary 2
Dr Ruth YY Hung (洪如蕊) has been appointed advisory editor of the boundary2 editorial collective based at the University of Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania, United States). A member of the collective since 2010, Dr Hung began her work with the journal as an assistant editor, bringing increased emphasis within her areas of expertise—including critical philology, global spectacle,…
“Conference Reflections: The Long Modernist Novel” by Jessica Siu-yin Yeung
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) My Paper In her review “Dragonflies”, Katherine Mansfield describes the seventh volume of Dorothy Richardson’s Pilgrimage, Interim as “a nest of short stories”. She sees the heroine of the novel sequence, Miriam Henderson, as “the box which holds them all, and really it seems there is no end to the number of…
“Buddhism, Selflessness, and the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” by Vinton Poon
‘[W]hen a layperson sees a mountain, he sees a mountain, but when an enlightened person sees a mountain, he does not see a mountain.’ Image source: via. Buddhism, as a religion or a philosophy, has many wonderful concepts that help us perceive life in a better way. The basic notion of this belief system is that…
“Reflections on a Conference — Travelling Texts: Encounters of Literatures” by Garfield Lau
The Conference The conference “Travelling Texts: Encounters of Literatures” (13–15 March 2014) aimed at exploring mutual influences and inspirations between authors. The focus of the conference was the South African writer J.M. Coetzee, the recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 2003. This conference provided a forum for scholars with a strong interest in…
“Reflections Upon My Conference Presentation at ACAH/LibrAsia 2014” by James Au
My presentation topic during the Osaka Asian Conference on Arts and Humanities (ACAH) 2014 was “Comparative Studies: Europe Dada Poetry, Guo Moruo’s “The Goddesses” and Takahashi Shinkichi’s Poetry”. As the topic suggests, this paper compares “The Goddesses” written by Guo Moruo (郭沬若), a Chinese literary poet renowned for his new poetry, European Dada poetry and the…
Department of English, Hong Kong Baptist University 