Professor CHU Hung-lam is Chair Professor of Chinese Culture at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU) and a Chang Jiang Scholars Chair Professor of Premodern Chinese History appointed by the Chinese Ministry of Education. He was PolyU’s Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, Head of Department of Chinese Culture, and Director of the Confucius Institute of Hong Kong (CIHK) from May 2012 to October 2017. He has been Chairman of Council of CIHK since April 2018. He is also Director of the Institute’s Center for Chinese History and Culture.
Professor Chu earned his PhD in East Asian Studies from Princeton University, USA. Prior to joining PolyU to found and head the Department of Chinese Culture in 2009, Professor Chu was a Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., Research Fellow of the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, and Professor and Deputy Chairman of the Department of History at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is a Founding Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities and recipient of The Chinese University of Hong Kong Vice-Chancellor’s Exemplary Teaching Award (2002) and the first Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship awarded by the University Grants Committee of Hong Kong (2012).
Professor Chu is by training a sinologist with specialization in the history and culture of late imperial China. His areas of research include the intellectual, social and political history of that period, particularly of the Ming dynasty, Neo-Confucian classics, and literary collections by Ming authors. He is an active researcher and serves the profession as editorial board member of a number of scholarly journals, reviewer of manuscripts and tenure cases, and assessor of academic units. His publications include Calligraphy and the East Asian Book and 9 other books as well as some 80 journal articles and book chapters on Ming history studies in Chinese and in English now included in the 5-volume collection published by Beijing’s Joint Publishers under the collective title of Zhu Honglin mingshi yanjiu xilie.
