Speaker Biography

Professor Lik Hang TSUI is a scholar of Chinese history and digital humanities, and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Chinese and History of the City University of Hong Kong. He has received the New Researcher Award from his College, a Teaching Excellence Award from CityU, and a Teaching Award (Early Career Faculty Members) from Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee (UGC), in recognition of his research and teaching.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in History from Peking University and obtained a doctoral degree in Oriental Studies (Chinese Studies) from the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Prior to joining CityU, he worked as a Departmental Lecturer in Classical Chinese at the University of Oxford, and a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University with the China Biographical Database (CBDB). He is elected a Fellow at both the Royal Historical Society and the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland. He has also held visiting appointments and fellowships at Academia Sinica, Peking University, Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, and University of Western Australia. 

He specializes in mid-imperial (or middle period/medieval, as some call it) Chinese history and culture, as well as the digital humanities. He has published over 20 scholarly articles and book chapters and over 60 articles for popular journals and newspapers. Tsui is currently writing a book on Song dynasty epistolary culture (10-13th centuries) and planning another one on digital humanities in China. His research has been funded by various fellowships and grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and beyond. He was also the recipient of the New Researcher Award in his College in CityU. 

Tsui teaches imperial Chinese history, cultural history, Classical Chinese, as well as the digital humanities. He also supervises graduate students in these areas. For his teaching he was awarded Hong Kong’s highest accolade for university teachers, the UGC Teaching Award as well as CityU’s own Teaching Excellence Award in 2023. He serves as an ambassador promoting good teaching practices and contributes to the Hong Kong Teaching Excellence Alliance as one of its four executive committee members.

Tsui co-edits book reviews for Cultural History and serves as an associate editor for IJHAC: A Journal of Digital Humanities. He is also on the editorial boards of Bloomsbury Cultural History, Digital Humanities, Digital Transformation and Society, and China’s first book series on the digital humanities. He established the Digital Society research cluster and later a Digital Learning and Literacy cluster in his College in CityU to promote interdisciplinary research. His findings and commentaries have been cited in international and local media. He and his colleagues compiled an award-winning glossary for the Education Bureau to help non-Chinese speaking students at the junior secondary level learn Chinese history.