Money and the State

Money is different things to different people, none more so than economists and anthropologists. Economists often see money as an instrument that makes bartering in the market run smoother – it’s easier to trade dollars than lug around actual cows and bags of rice for...

Paintings from Myanmar’s Lost Transition

Myanmar’s tumultuous history has not only been a major research focus for Professor Ian Holliday, it has impacted him personally. When the country began to open up just over a decade ago, he was Dean of Social Sciences at HKU. Given the significance of the changes at...

Museums of Remembrance and Forgetting

Museums tell a story as much by what they omit as what they contain. The National Museum of American History includes displays of all aspects of the country’s past and welcomes about three million visitors a year. But two key groups – African Americans and Native...

A Brief History of Art

“Chronology is our mental scaffolding for organising historical reasoning. It provides us with a strong sense of the continuity and incidences of time in order to understand historical causality,” says the introductory page of the Hong Kong Art Timeline, a project put...

Poetry in Motion

The discovery of a friendship between Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and Chinese poet Ai Qing in the 1950s became the starting point of research by Dr Bárbara Fernández Melleda, Assistant Professor in Latin American Studies at the School of Modern Languages and Cultures,...