All Affiliates
Dr Paul Smethurst
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr Paul Smethurst

BA, PhD London

Contact Information

Email

paulsmet@hku.hk

Profile

Paul Smethurst received his PhD on Space and Place in the Postmodern Novel from Birkbeck College, London in 1996. In a previous career, he developed mapping and geographical information systems (GIS), and he has maintained a cross-disciplinary interest in literature and geography. His particular teaching and research interests are in place-writing, literature and the environment and the geocritical imagination (a term he has coined) in contemporary fiction and travel writing. His most recent work includes a cross-cultural history of the bicycle and a new volume of essays (with Julia Kuehn) on latest research in travel writing studies. He has now retired from the University of Hong Kong and is working on a new book on nature writing.

Publications

The Postmodern Chronotope: Reading Space and Time in Contemporary Fiction (2000)

Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and Southeast Asia (2008) ed. With Steve Clark

Travel Writing, Form and Empire: The Politics and Poetics of Mobility (2009) ed. With Julia Kuehn

Travel Writing and the Natural World 1768-1840 (2012)

The Bicycle in History (2015)

New Directions in Travel Writing (2015) ed. with Julia Kuehn

Book chapters and refereed articles in journals and books. For major publications (books) see — main page.

1. Belonging and Placelessness in the Postmodern Novel' (pp.373-385), in Space and Place: The Geographies of Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool John Moore's University Press, 1997).

2. 'Post-imperial Topographies: The Ungrounding of History in The Singapore Grip, Insular Possession and Waterland' , (pp. 112-117) in Ralph Crane (ed), J.G. Farrell: The Critical Grip (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999).

3. 'Postmodern Blackness and Unbelonging in the Works of Caryl Phillips', The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 37 (2, 2002), pp. 5-19.

4. Revised version of 'Postmodern Blackness and Unbelonging in the Works of Caryl Phillips' printed in On the Road to Baghdad, or Traveling Biculturalism: Theorizing a Bicultural Approach to Contemporary World Fiction, ed. Gonul Pultar (New Academia, 2005), pp. 273 – 288.

5-6. 'Peter Ackroyd' – biographical profile and essay on Hawksmoor (with Julia Kuehn) in the Literary Encyclopedia (web-based publication, ed. Robert Clark, 2002-4)

7-9. 'Caryl Phillips' – biographical profile, and essays on Tom Stoppard's Travesties and Arcadia (with Julia Kuehn) Literary Encyclopedia (web-based publication, ed. Robert Clark, 2003/4)

10-18. 'Oderic of Pordenone', 'Paul Theroux', 'Claude Levi-Strauss', 'Fictional Travel', 'Imperialist Narrative', 'Tourism', 'Daniel Defoe', 'Jonathan Swift', 'Jan Morris' (9 articles) in The Literature of Travel and Exploration (Taylor Francis, 2003)

19. 'Travels in Globablity: Pico Iyer and Jan Morris in Hong Kong', Studies in Travel Writing 8 (2, 2004): 179-197.

20. 'The Journey from Modern to Postmodern in The Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Marco Polo's Divisament dou Monde', in Studies in Medievalism (special issue, Postmodern Medievalisms (Boydell and Brewer, 2005), pp. 159 – 179.

21. 'Introduction' to Marco Polo, The Travels of Marco Polo, (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005) XXV11 – XL1

22. 'No place for Shakespeare in Utopia: high culture and low conditioning’, in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World' in David Izzo (ed.), Brave New World: Essays. (2008)

23. ‘Introduction’ to Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (eds), Travel Writing, Form and Empire (Routledge, 2009), pp. 1-18.

24. ‘Post-Orientalism and the Past-Colonial in William Dalrymple’s Travel Histories’, in Justin Edwards and Rune Graulund (eds), Postcolonial Travel Writing: Critical Explorations (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 156-172.

25. ‘Peripheral Vision, Landscape, and Nation-Building in Thomas Pennant’s Tours of Scotland, 1769-72’, in Benjamin Colbert (ed), Travel Writing and Tourism in Britain and Ireland (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 13-30.

26. ‘The Flaneur on Wheels: Bicycle Mobility and the Sociological Gaze in Edward Thomas’s In Pursuit of Spring, in Studies in Travel Writing, September, 2014 (3).

27. ‘Discoverers and Explorers’ in The Routledge Companion to Travel Writing ed. Carl Thompson, (forthcoming, 2014).

28. ‘The Geocritical Imagination’ in English Language Notes ( ELN), special issue on ‘Imaginary Cartographies’ (In press, 52.1, Spring/Summer 2014)

29. ‘Habits of a Landscape: The Geocritical Imagination in Robert Macfarlane’s The Wild Places and The Old Ways in New Directions in Travel Studies, eds. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

30. ‘Introduction’ to New Directions in Travel Studies, eds. Julia Kuehn and Paul Smethurst (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

31. ‘Traveller/Travellee’, ‘Abroad’ and ‘Politics’ (3 articles) in Keywords in Travel Writing, eds. Zoe Kinsley, Charles Forsdick and Kate Walchester (Anthem Press, 2016).

32. ‘Travel Writing and the City’ in The Palgrave Handbook to Literature and the City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

33. ‘Nature Writing: The End of Nature and the Return of the Wild’ in The Ashgate Research Companion in Travel Writing, eds. Alasdair Pettinger and Tim Youngs (forthcoming, 2017).

Other outputs

'Marco Polo's Travels: The Book That Changed the World' – Special issue of Time Magazine, Summer 2006.

'Society in the Future: Utopia and Dystopia', in Digitale Oberstufe Englisch, Modul 3 / English Interactive, Advanced 2, (Berlin: Cornelson, 2003) CD-ROM publication.

Book reviews

1. Modern Language Review, 1995, Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction to Life. Ed. By Robert Polhemus and Roger B. Henkle, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994)

2-3. The Yearbook of English Studies, Jan. 1996, The Institution of Theory By Murray Krieger, (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) and The Myth of Theory By William Righter, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)

4. Modern Language Review, 1996 – Apocalypse Theory and The Ends of the World, Ed. Malcolm Bull (Wolfson College Lectures) Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.

5. Modern Language Review vol 93.3, 1998, pp. 814-5 – N ovel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction, By Richard Walsh. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995)

6. The Yearbook of English Studies vol 26, 1997 – Metaphors of Genre: The Role of Analogies in Genre Theory, by David Fishlov.

7. The Yearbook of English Studies vol 29, 1999, pp. 266-7 – The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, Ed. Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser

8-9. Books in Wales, Autumn 1996, pp. 14-5. Reviews of Poetry in the British Isles: Non-Metropolitan Perspectives, Ed, Hans-Werner Ludwig and Lothar Fietz, and Peripheral Visions: Images of Nationhood in Contemporary British Fiction. Ian A. Bell

10. Modern Language Review, vol 94.3, 1999, pp. 809-10 – T urning Points: Essays in the History of Cultural Expression. By Marshall Brown (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997)

11. Modern Language Review, vol 94.3, 1999, pp. 808-9 – The Division of Literature: Or the University in Deconstruction. By Peggy Kamuf. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997)

12-13. Modern Language Review, vol. 96.2, 2001, pp. 454-5 – Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored. By Arabella Lyon. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998; and Loiterature. By Ross Chambers. Lincolon and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1999.

14. Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 6, 2002, pp.142-144 – Defining Travel: Diverse Visions, ed. Susan L. Roberson. Jackson: University of Mississipi Press, 2001

15. Studies in Travel Writing, vol. 11, no. 2, 2007, pp. 205-208 — Return to Postmodernism: Theory-Travel Writing-Autobiography, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer. Heidelberg, 2005.

16. Review of English Studies, 61 (251, 2010): 667-668. Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space: Style, Landscape, Perception. By David James.

Conferences

'Depthlessness and the Postmodern'. University of Leeds. Contexts: Writing and History (1995)

'Of Postmodern Chronotopes, Cyberspace and the Ontology of Multiple Worlds'. University of Luton. Envisaging Futures (1996)

'History, Hybridity and Ethnicity in the Works of Timothy Mo and Caryl Philips'. Tampere, Finland, Crossroads in Cultural Studies (1998)

'The Poetic Image, the Speaking Being and the Poststructuralist World in J.M. Coetzee's Foe', University of Nottingham, Speech, Writing and Context (1998)

'Writing Sites: Towards a Genealogy of Travel', University of Hong Kong (1998)

'From Egeria to Village Nazareth 2000, Pilgrimage and Paradise in the Medieval and the Postmodern', University of Hong Kong (2001)

'Globality in the travel writings of Jan Morris and Pico Iyer', Tampere, Finland, Crossroads in Cultural Studies (2002)

'Modernity, Postmodernity and New/Late Modernity: Perspectives on China's 21st-century architecture', University of Tokyo, (2008)

Organiser (with Julia Kuehn) of Mobilis in Mobile: International Conference in Travel Writing, July, 2005.

All Affiliates
Dr Lisa Lim
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr Lisa Lim

BA NUS; PhD Reading

Contact Information

Email

lisa.ls.lim@gmail.com

Profile

Dr Lisa Lim graduated from the National University of Singapore with a First Class Honours in English Language, and went on to do her PhD in phonetics at the University of Reading. She returned to the Department of English Language and Literature of the National University of Singapore in 1996 as Lecturer/ Assistant Professor. In 2004 she exchanged balmy breezes for North Sea winds to be at the University of Amsterdam, for a year at the Institute of Phonetic Sciences, and then as senior lecturer and researcher at the Department of English and the Amsterdam Centre for Language and Communication (ACLC).

2009 saw her returning, thrilled, to tropical Asia, where she joined the School of English at the University of Hong Kong. As Coordinator of the Language and Communication (L&C) programme, a position she held for 7 years from September 2009 until August 2016, she revamped L&C's profile, turning its lens onto today's multilingual, globalised world, and introducing in the programme learning experiences such as fieldwork in local minority communities, field trips, a vibrant internship scheme, and knowledge exchange with the community. She was also Chair of the Departmental Research Postgraduate Committee from September 2014 until August 2016, during which time she helped develop a more engaged environment and created more visible platforms for the research activities and achievements of the School's research postgraduates. She took on the role of Head of the School of English from September 2016 until she left HKU and HK in June 2018. Some of her accomplishments during her Headship include driving the development of the fulltime mode of the taught MA programme, reinvigorating meaningful connections with alumni, and creating a vibrant School profile on social media. She assumed her position as Associate Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Sydney in January 2019, and still maintains her relationship with the School with her Honorary position, research postgraduate supervision, and collaborations and friendships with colleagues.

Her current research interests – reflected in her teaching and supervision – centre around: New Englishes, especially postcolonial Asian varieties in multilingual ecologies, such as Singapore and Hong Kong, with particular interest in contact dynamics, involving both sociohistorical and linguistic investigation; phonetics/ phonology/ prosody; language documentation; and issues of language shift, endangerment, revitalisation, and post-vernacular linguistic and cultural vitality in minority and endangered language communities, such as the Peranakans in Singapore and the Malays of Sri Lanka; and the sociolinguistics of globalisation, with interests in mobility, urban multiculturalism, computer-mediated communication, and their impact on language contact.

She was part of the team working on Sri Lanka Malay, supported by the Volkswagen Stiftung’s initiative for the documentation of endangered languages (2004-2009), and she recently brought to completion a project on The Ecology and Evolution of Asian Englishes, funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council (2012-2015). She is currently a collaborator in the World Universities Network (WUN) project on Understanding Globalisation – Margins and Peripheries. She has edited a number of books and special issues, in particular on both structural and sociolinguistics aspects of English in Asia. Her recent book, Languages in Contact (2016, co-authored with Umberto Ansaldo) is published with Cambridge University Press in their Key Topics in Sociolinguistics series

She is founding editor (with Umberto Ansaldo) of the new journal Language Ecology. She serves on the editorial boards of Language, Culture and Curriculum (Taylor & Francis), Language Sciences (Elsevier), Journal of Second Language Pronunciation (John Benjamins), World Englishes (Wiley-Blackwell); and the Faculty Advisory Board of Mercury, HKU Journal of Undergraduate Humanities.

Lisa is passionately committed to and actively engages in knowledge transfer. She developed the online resource LinguisticMinorities.hk, for which she won the HKU Faculty of Arts’ Knowledge Exchange Award 2014. She contributes (since July 2016) a fortnightly column 'Language Matters' for the South China Morning Post's Sunday Post Magazine, which aims to give readers a more nuanced appreciation for the sociohistorical ecologies and contact dynamics that underlie the origins of words, phrases and language practices in Hong Kong and the region, such as chit, chop, junk, chai, add oil, kiasu, tuk-tuk, have you eaten?, as well as address issues pertaining to minority language communities, language endangerment, migration, and language rights. Her columns can be accessed at http://www.scmp.com/author/lisa-lim

Lisa has been interviewed for her work in various media:

'Hongkongers mix English and Cantonese into new language, Kongish'. South China Morning Post (Lifestyle feature), 21 January 2016.
http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/1903452/hongkongers-mix-english-and-cantonese-new-language-kongish

'HK Profile: Dr Lisa Lim, Founder of LinguisticMinorities.hk'. Time Out Hong Kong, 4 November 2015 (online 12 November 2015).
http://www.timeout.com.hk/big-smog/features/74790/hk-profile-dr-lisa-lim-founder-of-linguisticminoritieshk.html

'Add oil! The evolution of Hong Kong English and where our unique words come from'. Post Magazine, South China Morning Post, 28 June 2015.
http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1825528/add-oil-evolution-hong-kong-english-and-where-our-unique?page=all

'Speech therapy'. HKU Bulletin, Vol 16, No 1, The University of Hong Kong, December 2014.
http://www4.hku.hk/pubunit/Bulletin/2014_Dec_Vol.16_No.1/knowledge_exchange/page2.html

'The many languages of Hong Kong'. KE Newsletter, Issue 6, The University of Hong Kong, April 2014.
http://www.ke.hku.hk/newsletter/issue6/languages

'Research and teaching staff of the School: A presentation of Dr Lisa Lim'. School of English Alumni, The University of Hong Kong, 2 September 2013.
http://www.english.hku.hk/alumni/10636/research-and-teaching-staff-of-the-school-a-presentation-of-dr-lisa-lim/

'English as she will be spoke', Michael Erard. New Scientist, 29 March 2008.

Publications

For downloadable articles, go to my Academia.edu webpage http://hku-hk.academia.edu/LisaLim

Books and special issues 

Lim, Lisa and Umberto Ansaldo. 2016. Languages in Contact. (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics.)Cambridge University Press.

Lim, Lisa, Christopher Stroud & Lionel Wee, eds. Contracted; in prep. The Multilingual Citizen. Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change. (Encounters.) Multilingual Matters.

Goh, Robbie, Lisa Lim & Lionel Wee, eds. 2013. The Politics of English in Asia: Language Policy and Cultural Expression in South and Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. (Studies in World Language Problems 4.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. 2011. The Typology of Asian Englishes. (Benjamins Current Topics 33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee, eds. 2010. English in Singapore: Modernity and Management. (Asian Englishes Today.) Hong Kong University Press. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. 2009. The Typology of Asian Englishes. Special Issue, English World-Wide 30(2). [Link tovolume TOC]

Lim, Lisa & Ee-Ling Low, eds. 2009. Multilingual, Globalising Asia: Implications for Policy and Education. AILA Review 22. [Link to volume TOC and abstracts]

Ansaldo, Umberto, Stephen Matthews & Lisa Lim, eds. 2007. Deconstructing Creole. (Typological Studies in Language 73.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Saldin, B.D.K. In collaboration with Lisa Lim. 2007. Kamus Bahasa Melayu Sri Lanka. A Sri Lanka Malay–Malay–English dictionary. Colombo; Frankfurt/ Nijmegen: Volkswagen Stiftung/ DoBeS.

Lim, Lisa, ed. 2004. Singapore English: A Grammatical Description. (Varieties of English Around the World G33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. [Link to volume TOC]

Language corpora 

Lim, Lisa and Umberto Ansaldo. 2013. Singlish structure dataset. In Susanne Maria Michaelis, Philippe Maurer, Martin Haspelmath and Magnus Huber, eds. Atlas of Pidgin and Creole Language Structures Online. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://apics-online.info/contributions/21

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2011. Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish). In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://www.ewave-atlas.org/

Ansaldo, Umberto, Lisa Lim & Sebastian Nordhoff. 2000-2014. Sri Lanka Malay. Documentation of Endangered Languages (DoBeS). Volkswagen Stiftung. http://dobes.mpi.nl/projects/slm/

Lim, Lisa. 2001. The Grammar of Spoken Singapore English Corpus (GSSEC). National University of Singapore.

Journal articles and book chapters 

Forthcoming/ in preparation

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. forthcoming. Citizenship theory and fieldwork practice in Sri Lanka Malay communities. In Lisa Lim, Christopher Stroud & Lionel Wee, eds. The Multilingual Citizen: Towards a Politics of Language for Agency and Change. (Encounters.) Multilingual Matters.

Lim, Lisa. forthcoming. The art of losing: From java and patois to post-vernacular vitality — Endangerment, empowerment and evolution in globalising Asian ecologies. In Martin Pütz and Luna Filipović, eds. Endangered Languages: Issues of Ecology, Policy and Documentation. (IMPACT Studies in Language and Society.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Lim, Lisa. 2016. Multilingual mediators: The role of the Peranakans in the contact dynamics of Singapore. In Li Wei, ed. Multilingualism in the Chinese Diaspora World-Wide. (Routledge Critical Studies in Multilingualism.) Routledge.

Lim, Lisa. 2015. Catalysts for change: On the evolution of contact varieties in multilingual knowledge economy. Ms. The University of Hong Kong.

Lim, Lisa. 2015. Singlish. In Rint Sybesma, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.

Lim, Lisa. 2015. Singapore: Language situation. In Rint Sybesma, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics. Leiden: Brill.

2013-2014

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. 2014. The lifecycle of Sri Lanka Malay. Language Endangerment and Preservation in South Asia. Special Issue, Language Documentation and Conservation 7: 100-118.

Lim, Lisa. 2014. Yesterday’s founder population, today’s Englishes: The role of the Peranakans in the (continuing) evolution of Singapore English. In Sarah Buschfeld, Thomas Hoffmann, Magnus Huber & Alexander Kautzsch, eds. The Evolution of Englishes. (Varieties of English Around the World G49.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 401-419.

Lim, Lisa. 2014. Southeast Asia. In Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola & Devyani Sharma, eds. The Oxford Handbook of World Englishes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lim, Lisa. 2013. The politics of English (and Sinhala and Tamil) in Sri Lanka: Kaduva of privileged power, tool of rural empowerment? In Lionel Wee, Robbie Goh and Lisa Lim, eds. The Politics of English in Asia: Language Policy and Cultural Expression in South and Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. (Studies in World Language Problems 4.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 61-80.

Wee, Lionel, Lisa Lim & Robbie B.H. Goh. 2013. Conclusion. In Lionel Wee, Robbie Goh & Lisa Lim, eds. The Politics of English in Asia: Language Policy and Cultural Expression in South and Southeast Asia and the Asia Pacific. (Studies in World Language Problems 4.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 303-316.

2012

Ansaldo, Umberto and Lisa Lim. 2012. English in Asia. In Raymond Hickey, ed. Areal Features of the Anglophone World. (Topics in English Linguistics.) Berlin/ New York: Mouton de Gruyter. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa. 2012. Standards of English in Southeast Asia. In Raymond Hickey, ed. Standards of English: Codified Varieties Around the World. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 274-293. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa. 2012. English and multilingualism in Singapore. In Carol A. Chappell, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Applied Linguistics. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing. [Link to volume]

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2012. Contact in the Asian arena. In Terttu Nevalainen and Elizabeth Closs Traugott, eds. The Oxford Handbook of the History of English. New York: Oxford University Press. 560-571. [Link to volume]

2011

Lim, Lisa. 2011. Tone in Singlish: Substrate features from Sinitic and Malay. In Claire Lefebvre, ed. Creoles, Their Substrates and Language Typology. (Typological Studies in Language 95.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 271-287.

Lim, Lisa. 2011. Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone languages? In Lisa Lim & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes, (Benjamins Current Topics 33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 97-118.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2011. Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish). In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Electronic World Atlas of Varieties of English [eWAVE]. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. http://www.ewave-atlas.org/.

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne. 2011. The typology of Asian Englishes: Setting the agenda. In Lisa Lim & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes, (Benjamins Current Topics 33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1-10.

2010

Lim, Lisa. 2010. Peranakan English in Singapore. In Daniel Schreier, Peter Trudgill, Edgar W. Schneider & Jeffrey P. Williams, eds. The Lesser-Known Varieties of English: An Introduction. (Studies in English Language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 327-347.

Lim, Lisa. 2010. Migrants and ‘mother tongues’: Extralinguistic forces in the ecology of English in Singapore. In Lisa Lim, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee, eds. English in Singapore: Modernity and Management. (Asian Englishes Today.) Hong Kong University Press. 19-54.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2010. Colloquial Singaporean English (Singlish). In Bernd Kortmann & Kerstin Lunkenheimer, eds. The Electronic World Atlas of Variation in English: Grammar. Max Planck Digital Library in cooperation with Mouton de Gruyter.

Lim, Lisa, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee. 2010. English in Singapore: Policy and practice. In Lisa Lim, Anne Pakir & Lionel Wee, eds. English in Singapore: Modernity and Management. (Asian Englishes Today.) Hong Kong University Press.

2009

Lim, Lisa. 2009. Revisiting English prosody: (Some) New Englishes as tone languages? In Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes Special Issue, English World-Wide 30(2): 218-239.

Lim, Lisa. 2009. Beyond fear and loathing in SG: The real mother tongues and language policies in multilingual Singapore. In Lim, Lisa & Low Ee-Ling, eds. Multilingual, globalizing Asia: Implications for policy and education. Special Issue, AILA Review 22: 52-71.

Lim, Lisa. 2009. Not just an 'Outer Circle', 'Asian' English: Singapore English and the significance of ecology. In Thomas Hoffman & Lucia Siebers, eds. World Englishes: Problems, Properties, Prospects. (Varieties of English Around the World G40.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 179-206.

Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne. 2009. The typology of Asian Englishes: Setting the agenda. In Lim, Lisa & Nikolas Gisborne, eds. The Typology of Asian Englishes Special Issue, English World-Wide 30(2): 123-132.

Lim, Lisa & Low Ee-Ling. 2009. Introduction. In Lim, Lisa & Low Ee-Ling, eds. Multilingual, globalizing Asia: Implications for policy and education. Special Issue, AILA Review 22: 1-4.

2007-2008

Lim, Lisa. 2008. Dynamic linguistic ecologies of Asian Englishes. Asian Englishes 11(1): 52-55.

Ansaldo, Umberto, Lisa Lim & Salikoko S. Mufwene. 2007. The sociolinguistic history of the Peranakans: What it tells us about ‘creolization’. In Umberto Ansaldo, Stephen Matthews & Lisa Lim, eds. Deconstructing Creole. (Typological Studies in Language 73.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 203-226.

Lim, Lisa. 2007. Mergers and acquisitions: On the ages and origins of Singapore English particles. World Englishes 27(4): 446-473.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2007. Identity alignment in the multilingual space: The Malays of Sri Lanka. In Anchimbe, Eric A., ed. Linguistic identity in postcolonial multilingual spaces Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 218-243.

2005-2006

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. 2006. Globalisation, empowerment and the periphery: The Malays of Sri Lanka. In Elangaiyan, R., R. McKenna Brown, Nicholas D.M. Ostler & Mahendra K. Verma, eds.Vital Voices: Endangered Languages and Multilingualism. Proceedings of the FEL X Conference. Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages; & Mysore: Central Institute of Indian Languages. 39-46.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2006. Keeping Kirinda vital: The endangerment-empowerment dilemma in the documentation of Sri Lanka Malay. In Aboh, Enoch & Miriam van Staden, eds. ACLC (Amsterdam Centre for Language & Communication) Working Papers 1: 51-66.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2005. Countries and Languages –Asia In Brown, Keith, ed. The Encyclopaedia of Language and Linguistics, 2nd ed. Elsevier Publishers.

Ng, Sandy & Lisa Lim. 2005. Appreciating language contact in pronunciation teaching: Local languages’ effect on Singapore English. In Deng, Xudong, Victor Matthew Cole, Maria Luisa C. Sadorra & Wu Siew Mei, eds. Paradigm shifts in English Language teaching and learning. (Selected Papers from the Inaugural CELC International Symposium.) Singapore: Centre for English Language Communication, National University of Singapore. 143-154.

2003-2004

Ansaldo, Umberto & Lisa Lim. 2004. Phonetic absence as syntactic prominence: Grammaticalization in isolating tonal languages. In Fischer, Olga, Muriel Norde & Harry Perridon, eds. Up and down the cline – The nature of grammaticalization. (Typological Studies in Language 59.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 345-362.

Lim, Lisa. 2004. Sounding Singaporean. In Lim, Lisa, ed. Singapore English: A grammatical description. (Varieties of English Around the World G33.)Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 19-56.

Lim, Lisa. 2004. Everything you wanted to know about how stressed Singaporean Englishes are. In Burusphat, Somsonge, ed. Papers from the eleventh annual meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society. Arizona: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State University.

Lim, Lisa & Joseph A. Foley. 2004. English in Singapore and Singapore English: Background and methodology. In Lim, Lisa, ed. Singapore English: A grammatical description. (Varieties of English Around the World G33.) Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1-18.

Lim, Lisa & Umberto Ansaldo. 2003. Sounds Cocos. In Solé, M.J., D. Recasens & J. Romero, eds. Proceedings of the XVth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS2003). Barcelona: The 15th ICPhS Organizing Committee. 803-806.

All Affiliates
Dr Katherine Chen
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr Katherine Chen

(BA, M.Phil HKU; MA, PhD U Michigan)

Contact Information

Email
khychen@hku.hk
All Affiliates
Dr David Karlander
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr David Karlander

BA, MPhil Uppsala, PhD Stockholm

Contact Information

Email

dakar@hku.hk

Profile

David Karlander studies language and communication. His research covers topics in intellectual history, sociolinguistics, semiology and the philosophy of language. He currently investigates uses and visions of constructed languages in political thought, mainly during the first half of the 20th century. He has previously published on minority language politics, graffiti, the history of linguistics, and the idea of deficit in theories of bilingualism.

Publications

Karlander, D. In press (2020). Ideological indeterminacy: Worker Esperantism in 1920s Sweden. Language & Communication 00, 00–00.

Karlander, D. 2019. A semiotics of nonexistence? Erasure and erased writing under anti-graffiti regimes. Linguistic Landscapes 5(2), 198–216.

Karlander, D. 2018. The linguistic prerequisites for cultural analysis: Lars Levander’s reocentric ethnographies of Swedish peasant life and language. Signs and Society 6(3), 504–530.

Karlander, David. 2018. Backjumps: Writing watching, erasing train graffiti. Social Semiotics 28(1), 41–59.

Karlander, David. 2017. State categories, state vision and vernacular woes in Sweden's language politics. Language Policy 17(3), 343–363. 

Karlander, David. 2017. Authentic Language. Stockholm: Stockholm University.

Karlander, David. 2017. Roads to regimentation: Place, authenticity and the metapragmatics of naming. Language & Communication 53, 11–24. 

Karlander, David. 2015. Register and artefact: Enregistering authenticity in an engagement with Övdalsk descriptivist texts. Language & Communication 45, 12–26.

All Affiliates
Dr Otto Heim
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr Otto Heim

Lic. phil., PhD Basel

Contact Information

Email
oheim@hku.hk

Profile

Originally from Switzerland, I joined HKU in 2001. My main research interests evolved from my early work in the field of postcolonial studies, focusing on writing from the Pacific, or Oceania, specifically poetry and performance. From this developed a more general interest in island studies, especially in the historical and contemporary significance of vernacular island cultures and worldviews and their capacity to challenge dominant paradigms of globality. I have served on the editorial boards of the Island Studies Journal, Shima, and Urban Island Studies and have co-organized several conferences at HKU, including the symposium on Oceanic Archives and Transnational American Studies in 2012, the 15th Biennial Symposium on Literature and Culture in the Asia-Pacific Region on the theme of Elegance and Messiness in the Age of Risk in 2013, the second Island Cities and Urban Archipelagos conference in 2016, and the symposium The Space Between: Creativity, Performance and Impact in Contemporary Island Societies in 2018.

At HKU I have served on multiple committees and boards in various capacities and was an Associate Dean and Chairman of the Board of Examiners in the Faculty of Arts from 2006 to 2010 and Head of the School of English from 2010 to 2013. I was awarded a Faculty Teaching Excellence Award in 2017 and the University's Excellent and Inclusive Practice Award in 2024. I was the Director of the Full-time MAES Programme from 2022 to 2025.

Recent publicationS:

Otto Heim, “Islanding Hong Kong in Recent Visual Art.” HK Archi-note (建築言集), no. 1, 2026, pp. 111-26.

Myriem Alnet and Otto Heim, "Sailing Within Hong Kong’s Outlying Islands: The 2nd Inter-Island Festival, Hong Kong, November 2023." Shima, vol. 18, no. 1, 2024, pp. 196-206.

All Affiliates
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr Wendy Gan

BA, PhD London

Contact Information

Email

wchgan@hku.hk

Profile

I arrived in Hong Kong after completing my PhD at King's College London. My thesis on interwar British women's writing looked in particular at the essays of women writers such as Virginia Woolf, Rose Macaulay, Storm Jameson and Rebecca West and was concerned with how studying the essays of these different women writers produced a complicated picture of modern writing that went beyond modernism.

Research

British women's middlebrow writing from the early twentieth century; British women modernists; Middlebrow writing set in China by Ann Bridge and Stella Benson; HK film

 

Publications

Monographs
  1. Women, Privacy and Modernity in Early Twentieth Century Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
  2. Fruit Chan's Durian Durian. New Hong Kong Cinema Series, Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong, 2005.
Recent journal articles
  1. 'Southwards and Outwards: Representing Chineseness in New Locations in Hong Kong Films'. China Abroad. Edited by Elaine Y.L. Ho and Julia Kuehn. (In press; Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong).
  2. 'Re-imagining Hong Kong-China from the sidelines: Fruit Chan's Little Cheung'. Hong Kong Alternative Cinema. Edited by Gina Marchetti, Tan See-kam and Esther Cheung. (Forthcoming; contracted to Hong Kong University Press, Hong Kong).
  3. Tropical Hong Kong: Narratives of Absence and Presence in Hollywood and Hong Kong Films of the 50s and 60s'. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography. Special Issue on the Tropical Asian City on Film. Edited by Chua Beng Huat. March 2008.
  4. 'The Hong Kong Local on Film: Re-imagining the Global'. Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media. Vol. 49, 2007. http://www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/wendygan/index.html
  5. Leisure in Interwar Domestic Novels'. Women: A Cultural Review, vol. 17, no. 2, 2006.
  6. '0.01cm: Affectivity and Urban Space in Chungking Express'. Scope: an online journal of film studies, Nov 2003. http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/film/journal/articles/affectivity-and-urban-space.htm.
  7. 'A Return to Romance: Winifred Holtby's Spinster Novels from Between the Wars'. Orbis Litterarum: International Review of Literary Studies, Vol. 58, no. 3, Spring 2003.
All Affiliates
Dr Jessica Valdez
Honorary Associate Professor

Dr Jessica Valdez

BA, MA, PhD Johns Hopkins

Contact Information

Email

jvaldez@hku.hk

Profile

Jessica R. Valdez is an associate professor of English. Her interdisciplinary research offers new ways of thinking about the novel, media, empire, and colonialism in nineteenth-century literature and culture. 

She is currently working on a book-length project called, Despots and Democrats: China and America in Nineteenth-Century British Literature, that analyzes the intersecting imaginaries of the United States and China in nineteenth-century British literature. This research investigates the paradoxical linkage of despotism with democracy, majority rule, and the “people” in nineteenth-century British literature. British writers saw the United States alternately as a land of democratic promise and as a country ruled by despotic majority. China, on the other hand, was seen as timeless and unchanging, what John Stuart Mill called the “despotism of Custom.” She contends that British writers navigated debates about democracy by blurring together conceptual opposites: figures of Asian despotism and American democracy. Examples include the metaphor of contagion expressed in British fears of Americanization and Asian immigration, as well as the use of Bret Harte’s poem, “The Heathen Chinee,” in making sense of American characters in British novels. She thus argues that visions of competing empires–Britain, China, and the United States–contributed to British conceptions of liberalism and democracy. She has received the Belcher Visiting Fellowship in Victorian Studies from the University of Oxford and a Hong Kong General Research Fund ($424,868 HKD) to complete this book. She is organizing a virtual roundtable on a related topic for the North American Victorian Studies Association in Spring 2021.

Her first book, Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel (EUP 2020), analyzes competing understandings of national identity in nineteenth-century novels and the newspaper press, concluding with Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill’s portrayal of the Anglo-Jewish press in his novel, Children of the Ghetto. Victorian novelists thus emerge as early media theorists, thinking through the contrasting systems of reality offered by newspapers and novels. This project was funded by an Early Career Scheme fellowship from the Hong Kong General Research Fund (428,268 HKD). 

Her other research intervenes in the growing field of seriality studies by framing novels’ experiments with serial form as a means to problematize national and imperial power. She contributed to a special issue on seriality for Journal of Modern Periodical Studies and recently completed an article rethinking serial form in the work of Anthony Trollope. She is also working on another project that studies the transatlantic influence of the Yiddish literary tradition on British and American realism. This project, tentatively titled A Hybrid Realism, examines the formal influences of the Yiddish literary tradition on late-nineteenth-century English-language Jewish authors like British writer Israel Zangwill and American writer Abraham Cahan.

She recently founded the Nineteenth-Century Research Cluster (https://www.ncrc.hku.hk, Twitter handle @19thHku) to encourage more interdisciplinary communication between scholars in nineteenth-century studies.​

She invites MPhil and PhD applications in the areas of nineteenth-century literature and culture, novel studies, narrative, empire and colonialism, transatlantic literature, crime writing, realism and the sensation novel, and nineteenth-century journalism and media studies.

Publications

Monographs

Plotting the News in the Victorian Novel​​, forthcoming, Edinburgh University Press

Journal Articles – Refereed

“‘Our Impending Doom’: Seriality’s End in Late-Victorian Proto-Dystopian Novels,” special issue on “Seriality,” Journal of Modern Periodical Studies, 9.1 (2018).

“‘This is Our City’: Realism and the Sentimentality of Place in David Simon’s The Wire,” European Journal of American Culture, 34.3 (2015), pp. 193-209.
“How to Write Yiddish in English, or Israel Zangwill and Multilingualism in Children of the Ghetto,” Studies in the Novel, 46.3 (2014), pp. 315-334.

“‘Dickens’s ‘Pious Fraud’: The Popular Press and Narrative’s Potential for Social Control,” Victorian Periodicals Review, 44.4, pp. 377-400.

Encyclopaedia Entries

“Melodrama,” Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction, ed. Kevin A. Morrison (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018)

 “Sarah Grand,” Companion to Victorian Popular Fiction, ed. Kevin A. Morrison (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2018)