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Dr Elizabeth Ho
Programme Director, Master of Arts in English Studies (Literature)

Dr Elizabeth Ho

BA Smith; MA U of Vermont; PhD Rutgers

Contact Information

Phone

3917-2766

Email

lizho@hku.hk

Profile

Dr Liz Ho received her PhD in English Literature from Rutgers University in 2004. She specializes in late twentieth-century and twenty-first century Anglophone fiction and cultural politics; with research and teaching interests in postcolonial theory and fiction; film, visual literatures such as comics and graphic novel; and global literatures in English. Her monograph, Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire (Continuum, 2012), explores how the resurrection of the nineteenth century in contemporary British and postcolonial texts, ranging from novels to graphic novels, “steampunk” and Jackie Chan films, allows the ghostly legacy of imperialism to be staged and remembered in and for the present. Liz’s second monograph, Map-ability: The Imperative to Map in Contemporary Fiction, brings together geo-criticism, critical geography and postcolonial theory to extend a series of critical possibilities in contemporary fiction called “map-ability”.

Liz is the Editor-in-Chief of ASAP/Journal (Johns Hopkins UP), Consultant Editor for Neo-Victorian Studies, and currently serves on the advisory and editorial boards of the International Journal of Students as Partners and the Journal of Cultural Urban Studies. 

Publications

monographs:

Map-ability: The Imperative to Map in Contemporary Literature and Culture.  Under contract with The Ohio State University Press.

Neo-Victorianism and the Memory of Empire. London & New York: Continuum, 2012.

Edited Collections and Special Issues of journals:

The Routledge Companion to Global Literary Adaptations in the Twenty-First Century. Co-edited with Prof. Brandon Chua.  London & New York: Routledge, 2023.

Neo-Victorian Heterotopias.  Special issue of Humanities. Co-edited with Prof. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Dr. Akira Suwa. 11.1 (2022).

Neo-Victorian Asia. Special issue of Neo-Victorian Studies, 11.2 (2019).

Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher and her afterlife in contemporary culture. Co-edited with Louisa Hadley. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

Journal articles:

“Moving Islands: Thinking with the Archipelago in Hong Kong.” Verge: Studies in Global Asia. 11.1  (2025).

“Heterotopic and Neo-Victorian Affinities: Introducing the Special Issue on Neo-Victorian Heterotopias.” Humanities: Special Issue: Neo-Victorian Heterotopias. 11.1 (2022) https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010008

“Heterotopic Heritage in Hong Kong: Tai Kwun and Neo-Victorian Carceral Space.” Humanities: Special Issue: Neo-Victorian Heterotopias. 11.1 (2022)  https://doi.org/10.3390/h11010012

“Maps and Mapping Practices in Post-reunification Hong Kong.”Cultural Critique, 113  (2021): 103 – 130

“Temporal Rifts in Hong Kong: the Slow Arts of Protest.” ASAP/Journal, 4.3 Oct. (2019): 619 – 644. 

“‘Last Empress’ Fiction and Asian Neo-Victorianism”. Neo-Victorian Studies: Special Issue: Neo-Victorian Asia, 11.2 (2019): 64 – 90.

“Introduction to Neo-Victorian Asia: An Inter-imperial Approach”. Neo-Victorian Studies: Special Issue: Neo-Victorian Asia, 11.2 (2019): 1 – 17. 

“Small steps towards an ethos of partnership: a focus group on ‘homework’.” International Journal of Students as Partners 1 (2),  2017. https://doi.org/10.15173/ijsap.v1i2.3198

“Faculty-student engagement in teaching observation and assessment: a Hong Kong initiative,” Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 41.8 (2015):  1193 – 1205.

“Victorian maids and neo-Victorian labour in Kaoru Mori’s Emma: A Victorian Romance,” Neo-Victorian Studies: Special Issue: Neo-Victorianism and Feminism: New Approaches, 6.2 (2013): 40 – 63.

“I think it’s really about us:” Review of Lisa See’s Snow Flower and the Secret Fan and Wayne Wang’s film adaptation. Neo-Victorian Studies, 4.2 (2011): 191-202 (review essay).

“From having it all to away from it all:”  Post-feminism in Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel, Tamara Drewe. College Literature, 38.2 (2011): 45 – 65.

“Postimperial landscapes: Psychogeography and Englishness in Alan Moore’s graphic novel From Hell.”Cultural Critique, 63 (2006): 99 – 121.

“Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs and the trauma of convictism.” Antipodes: A North American Journal for Australian Literature, December, 17.2 (2003): 124 – 132.

Book chapters:

“Empire Fictions.” Handbook on Neo-Victorianism, eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben. Amsterdam: Brill.  Forthcoming, 2025.

“Translating Pedagogical Partnership in/to Academic Staff Development in the Global South” with Alison Cook-Sather, Amrita Kaur, and Tayyaba Tamim. Academic Staff Development: Disruptions, Complexities, Change, eds. Nalini Chitanand and Shoba Rathilal.  South Africa: African Sun Media (2024).

“The Child, Public Housing and Public Space in Yeung Hok-Tat’s How Blue Was My Valley”. Routledge Companion of Literary Urban Studies, ed. Lieven Ameel.  London: Routledge (2022).

“The Geography Helps”: Affective Geographies and Maps in A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers. Re-mapping Homeland: Affective Geographies and Cultures of the Chinese Diaspora, eds. Robert T. Tally Jr. and Melody Yunzi Li. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies series, Houndsmill Basingstoke:  Palgrave Macmillan (2022).

“Asian Masculinity and Whiteness in Cassandra Clare’s Infernal Devices Trilogy”. The Victorian Period in 21st Century Children’s and Adolescent Literature, eds. Sara K. Day and Sonya Sawyer-Fritz. London & New York: Routledge (2018). 

Reprinted in Race in Young Adult Dystopian and Speculative Fiction, eds. Miranda Green-Barteet and Meghan Gilbert-Hickey. University of Mississippi Press (2020).

“Politicizing Maps and Emotion: Transforming Cities, Transforming Texts”. Transforming Cities: Narratives of Urban Change in the 19th and 21st Centuries, eds. Nora Plesske, Monika Pietrzak-Franger and Eckart Voigts. Universitatsverlag Heidelberg (2017).

“Adapt Re-use: Hong Kong’s neo-Victorian spaces,” Neo-Victorian Cities: Reassessing Urban Politics and Poetics, eds. Marie-Luise Kohlke and Christian Gutleben. Amsterdam: Brill (2015).

“The Neo-Victorian-At-Sea: Towards a Global Memory of the Victorian,” Neo-Victorian Literature and Culture: Immersions and Revisitations, eds. Nadine Boehm and Susanne Gruss, London & New York: Routledge (2014).