Steering Committee

David See-Chai Lam Centre for International Communciation is headed by a Director and governed by a Steering Committee. It also has an Advisory Board and members that participate in the activities of the Centre.

Co-Directors

Michael Hathaway

Professor, Department of Sociology & Anthropology
BA (California, Santa Cruz), MA , PhD (Michigan)

Dr. Michael Hathaway is Professor of Anthropology, Associate Member of the School for International Studies, and the Director of SFU’s David Lam Centre for Asian Studies. A Guggenheim Fellow, his work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, Social Science Research Council, National Science Foundation, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, and Toyota Foundation, among others.

His first research project examines global environmentalism and the politics of Indigeneity. This research was based on multi-sited fieldwork in rural and urban Southwest China. It explored how local residents, Chinese scientists and expatriate conservationists forge new constellations of meanings, practices, and forms of governance in contemporary China. This work examines changing understandings of nature, social categories, and power. It was published as Environmental Winds: Making the Global in Southwest China (University of California Press, 2013).

His second major project explores the global commodity chain of the matsutake, one of the world’s most expensive mushrooms, following it from the highlands of the Tibetan Plateau to the markets of urban Japan. In it, he asks what happens when we imagine “world-making” not to be capacity exclusive to humanity, but as a part of all organisms, including the seemingly humble fungus? This work has culminated in a new book, called What a Mushroom Lives For: Matsutake and the Worlds They Make, (Princeton University Press, 2022). It is the second volume in a trilogy, starting with Anna Tsing’s The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. This project is part of the Matsutake Worlds Research Group, with Tim Choy, Lieba Faier, Miyako Inoue, Shiho Satsuka and Elaine Gan. The team explores the more-than-human social worlds this mushroom engenders in Canada, the United States, China, and Japan.

Shuyu Kong

Professor, Department of Humanities
BA, MA (Peking University), PhD (UBC)

Dr. Shuyu Kong is a professor in the Department of Humanities at Simon Fraser University. She taught at University of Alberta and University of Sydney before coming to SFU where she teaches Chinese literary and cultural studies and Asian Diaspora studies. Besides numerous articles in referred journals and book chapters, Shuyu is the author of two books Consuming Literature: Bestsellers and the Commercialization of Literary Production in Contemporary China (Stanford University Press, 2005), and Popular Media, Social Emotion and Public Discourse in Contemporary China (Routledge, 2014, 2017). She is also co-translator of Beijing Women (with Colin S. Hawes, Merwin Asia, 2014).

Shuyu’s current research projects include: the screening of foreign films in China in the late 1970s and 1980s; Taiwan literature and creative industry; the early modernization of Chinese arts in the first half of 20th century; and Chinese-language television in Canada. She is also interested in introducing Chinese classics to post-secondary liberal education curriculum.

Shuyu was visiting fellow/scholar or guest lecturer at College of Communication, National Chengchi University (2016), School of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University (2015), International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden University (2013), School of Culture, History & Language, College of Asia and the Pacific, Australia National University (2012), and School of Journalism and Communication, Chinese University of Hong Kong (2011).

Committee

Nadine Attewell

Associate Professor, Department of Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies
BA (Toronto), MA (Cornell), PhD (Cornell)

As a scholar of empire, intimacy, and Asian and Asian diasporic life, Nadine's work is feminist, queer, anticolonial, and antiracist in methodology and orientation, and informed by her positioning as a second-generation settler of Chinese descent. Nadine's first book, Better Britons: Reproduction, National Identity, and the Afterlife of Empire, investigates the centrality of reproduction to postimperial projects of governance and nation-building through readings of twentieth-century literature and policy from Australia, Britain, and New Zealand, and was published by the University of Toronto Press in 2014. Nadine is currently working on a SSHRC-funded second book, entitled Archives of Intimacy: Racial Mixing and Asian Lives in the Colonial Port City, about Chinese practices of interracial intimacy and multiracial community under British colonial rule. Here, she delves into the heterogeneous social worlds that flourished in port cities like Hong Kong, London, and Liverpool during the first half of the twentieth century, developing vivid accounts of port city life pieced together from a range of archival materials, including photography, community and family histories, and wartime intelligence reports, that testify to the reach and limits of empire as a structure of meaning.

Jeremy Brown

Professor, Department of History
PhD (University of California, San Diego)

A white settler born in Iowa, Jeremy Brown (he/him) specializes in the social history of modern China. His latest book is June Fourth: The Tiananmen Protests and Beijing Massacre of 1989. Brown's digital history projects include the SFU Tiananmen Project, PRC History Transparency Project (supported by the DLC), and Grassroots Chinese History Archive (supported by the DLC). Brown has two sons and is an avid middle-distance runner and a fan of 1990s hip-hop.

Darren Byler

Assistant Professor, School for International Studies
B.A. (Kent), M.A. (Columbia), PhD (Washington)

Darren Byler is a sociocultural anthropologist whose teaching and research examines the dispossession of stateless populations through forms of contemporary capitalism and colonialism in China, Central Asia, and Southeast Asia. His monograph, Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City (Duke University Press, 2021), examines emerging forms of media, infrastructure, economics and politics in the Uyghur homeland in Chinese Central Asia (Ch: Xinjiang). His current research follows up on the argument of his first book to consider how contemporary capitalism and colonialism travels through digital infrastructural systems from China to Malaysia. In public-facing work regarding the crisis confronting the Uyghurs and others in Northwest China, he has worked in an advisory capacity with faculty and researchers at the University of British Columbia and Simon Fraser University to build a Xinjiang Documentation Project. He also writes a regular column on these issues for the journal SupChina, as well as essays for other public outlets such as the Guardian, Noema Magazine, and ChinaFile. 

Rosalie L. Tung

Professor, The Ming and Stella Wong Professor of International Business, Beedie School of Business
BA (York), MBA, PhD (UBC), FRS(C), Fellow of the Academy of Management, Fellow of the Academy of International Business, Fellow of the British Academy of Management

Rosalie L. Tung completing a five-year term as vice-president, president and past president of the Academy of Management (2000–2005). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, the Academy of Management, and the Academy of International Business, she also won the 1998 Vancouver YWCA Woman of the Year award in Management, the Professions and Trades; in 1997 she won the American Society for Advanced Global Competitiveness Research Award. Rosalie joined SFU Business in 1991 after serving on the faculties of a number of American universities, including a Wisconsin Distinguished Professorship with the University of Wisconsin System and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. She has been a visiting professor at universities around the world, including Harvard, and has served on the United Nations’ Task Force on Human Resource Management. Rosalie is also involved in management development and consulting activities around the world. In her spare time, she enjoys Chinese brush painting, and meditation.

David Zandvliet

Professor, Faculty of Education and Director for the Institute for Environmental Learning
PhD (Curtain University of Technology)

David Zandvliet is a Professor at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, Canada) and Director of the Institute for Environmental Learning. He has held additional appointments as associate faculty and teaching fellow in the Faculty of Environment (SFU) and is currently an associate member in the Faculty of Science (SFU).  He was recently appointed as the  newly established UNESCO Chair in Bio-cultural Diversity and Education at Simon Fraser University.

An experienced teacher and researcher, David has published numerous articles in international journals and presented refereed conference papers on six continents and in over 17 countries. His career interests lie in the areas of science, technology and environmental education. As a former director of the Faculty’s Centre for Educational Technology, he has also considerable experience in the physical design and evaluation of classrooms and in provision of teacher professional development. He has conducted research and development on learning environments in Australia, Canada, Indonesia, Malaysia, Sri Lanka and Taiwan.