Helen Hok-Sze Leung (Current Director)

Helen Hok-Sze Leung is a Professor in the Department of of Gender, Sexuality & Women's Studies at Simon Fraser University. She is the author of Undercurrents: Queer Culture and Postcolonial Hong Kong (UBC Press, 2008) and Farewell My Concubine: A Queer Film Classic (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2010). Her articles have been published in numerous edited collections and journals including positions, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Journal of Lesbian Studies, TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, and Urban Studies. She is a co-editor of the Queer Asia book series (Hong Kong UP) and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Chinese Cinemas (Routledge), TSQ:Transgender Studies Quarterly (Duke UP), Asian Visual Cultures (Amsterdam UP) and Performance Matters (SFU). Her current research projects include: Transpacific Film Cities, a SSHRC-funded study on Transpacific Film Cities and an oral history project on Queer Asian acitivism in Vancovuer during the 2000s. 

Christine Kim (Founding Co-director)

Christine Kim is is Professor in the Department of English Language and Literatures and a faculty affiliate of Asian Canadian Studies and Asian Migration program (ACAM) at the University of British Columbia. She was the editor-in-chief of the journal Canadian Literature (2020-25). Before joining UBC in 2020, she taught at Simon Fraser University where she was a founding co-director of Simon Fraser University’s Institute of Transpacific Cultural Research. Her research and teaching interests lie in Asian diaspora, the Cold War, imperialism, and race.

She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race (University of Illinois Press, 2016) and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity (Wilfrid Laurier UP, 2012). Her forthcoming book, Brutal Fantasies: Imagining North Korea in the Long Cold War (Duke UP, 2025), examines cultural representations of North Korea as they coalesce around Western fantasies of the inhuman. Christine is working on a new project that examines literary and filmic representations of Korean diasporas and migrations within illiberal spheres.

John Nguyet Erni

John Nguyet Erni is Chair Professor of Cultural Studies and Co-Director, Research Centre for Creative Arts and Public Value at the Educational University of Hong Kong. He is also an elected Fellow and Member of the Executive of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.  Erni has published widely on international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth popular consumption in Hong Kong and Asia, and critical public health.  His books include (In)visible Colors: Images of Non-Chinese in Hong Kong Cinema – A Filmography, 1970s – 2010s (with Louis Ho, Cinezin Press, forthcoming in 2016); Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture (forthcoming in 2016, Springer); Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, HKUP, 2014); Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations (Routledge, 2011); Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (with Ackbar Abbas, Blackwell, 2005); Asian Media Studies: The Politics of Subjectivities (with Siew Keng Chua, Blackwell, 2005); and Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of “Curing” AIDS (Minnesota, 1994).  Currently, he is completing a book project on the legal modernity of rights.