Event details

Join us for research seminars hosted by the Department of History with a selection of visiting academics, alongside University of York researchers. All students and staff are very welcome.

Speaker: Vivian Kong, Senior Lecturer, Department of History, University of Bristol.

Date:  2 April 2025    

Time: 5:30- PM

Location: 5.30pm, V/N/123

'A zoom link will be made available for distance learning PhD students on request'

Please contact Dilnoza Duturaeva (dilnoza.duturaeva@york.ac.uk) and Ana Otero-Cleves (anamaria.otero-cleves@york.ac.uk) if you have any questions. You can view the full schedule for the semester here.

Biography:

Dr. Vivian Kong is a social historian specializing in colonial Asia, with a focus on diasporic interactions, identity politics, cosmopolitanism, and colonial practices. Her research primarily centers on colonial Hong Kong, examining how its global connections and multi-ethnic urban environment influenced identities and social dynamics.

 Her first book, Multiracial Britishness: Global Networks in Hong Kong 1910-45 (Cambridge University Press, November 2023), utilizes Hong Kong as a case study to demonstrate the diverse 'races' within the British Empire and how this diversity both enriched and complicated understandings of Britishness. The book explores the negotiations of multiracial inhabitants of colonial Hong Kong with Britishness and analyzes how global cosmopolitan ideals and rising nationalism shaped Britishness during the interwar period.

 Currently, she is working on a new book that explores the life of an Anglo-Chinese Eurasian woman and her complex family relationships across Hong Kong, Cornwall, London, China, and Singapore from 1887 to 1943.