University of Hong Kong

This course examines the emergence of cities from the urban revolution around 5,000 BC to 4,000 BC first in Western Asia, through the key milestones of our urban evolution, to the current era of megacities and megaregions. The issues covered in this course include the birth of cities as a part of urban lifecycles; the projection of power; order and governance; disruption and reconfiguration; humanistic cities; building cities for mass populations; conflict, community, and faith; trends and competitions; unprecedented societal changes and urban growth; contemporary urbanism and our planetary future. We will focus on the development of a particular urbanism with its constituent cities as we expound each of these issues, while seeking to bring comparative case studies to illustrate how these issues have been unravelled in similar and diverse ways in other urbanisms and historical periods.

FinTech (Financial Technology) has revolutionized how traditional financial services can be provided to the general public and prompted financial service providers to re-consider how they should do business across an expansive, and expanding, range of commercial enterprises. This course will trigger students to think about how FinTech can tackle important global issues, both social and financial, and open up new and emerging markets.

This course examines the history of Daoist art from its pre-Daoist origin to its popularization in Late Imperial period. Students will be introduced to the visual and iconographic features of the Daoist pantheon and the rich material culture associated with Daoist rituals. Emphasis is also placed on considering Daoist art’s cultural and political contexts.

This course examines major theories of the aesthetic and aesthetic value. Commonly defined as a philosophy of Art and the way in which we judge and appreciate artistic productions, the discourse of aesthetics raises a set of compelling questions about the fraught relationship between beauty, pleasure, judgment, and value. Students will explore a range of theories on the aesthetic and aesthetic judgment, and think more broadly about the purpose of the literary in broader society. Writers considered may include Plato on Mimesis; Aristotle on Catharsis; Burke on the sublime; Kant on Hedonism; Marx on art and value; as well as more recent debates on aesthetic affects coming out of contemporary queer theory.

This course examines how linguistic forms and literary devices are related to aesthetic effects and ideological functions. It will analyze and discuss how the choice and the patterning of words, sounds and images orchestrate to embody, mediate and elicit feelings and thoughts, and views and values. Topics include: towards characterizing literary linguistics; collocation, deviation and word play; prosody, parallelism and performance; discourse into discourse; narration and representation of speech and thought; reader positioning and response.

This course examines the intersection of music, AI, and creativity, drawing from the rapidly expanding critical scholarship on AI. While the class prioritizes musicological, sociocultural, and philosophical approaches to critiquing AI, it will also engage with other genres of writings from media studies, music information retrieval (MIR), computational creativity, and from within the music industry. 

This course examines health communication from patient-doctor interactions and inter-professional encounters to media campaigns and patient-patient interactions on social media. Topics include authentic data from a variety of healthcare sites (from primary care encounters to specialist clinics to genetic counseling) to examine some critical issues of health communication such as patient-centeredness and shared decision-making between healthcare professionals and patients; delivery of accurate and accessible healthcare information; and communicating health risk and uncertainty. 

This course examines the dominant socio-cultural framework and literary and critical practices that define postmodernism in the twentieth century. Students will explore the major debates, key ideas and texts that enable an understanding of the postmodern turn and continue to define contemporary literature in the present.

This course examines various arts and themes from a region now called Asia, from the past to the present. Rather than providing a chronological or regional survey, it is designed to introduce students to the similarities and differences among cultures, their histories, and the skills needed to critically analyze visual materials from these regions. The primary focus will be on China, allowing students to utilize external resources such as museums and art galleries in Hong Kong. The course aims to highlight key ideas and themes in Asian art history, including how these concepts are transmitted, adapted, and transformed across different regions. Students will gain insights into fundamental aspects of Asian art, such as Buddhism, the Confucian code of authority, the significance of ink and brush painting, and contemporary art discussions that have global impact. 

This course examines representative novels of twenty-first-century literature in English and in English translation. In what ways have these literary works of the twenty-first century reshaped the novel form in order to respond to the crises that define our present
moment? How is the distribution and circulation of these works influenced by developments in technology and social media? What are the dominant criteria of success for literary works? We will look to answer these crucial questions and many more by focusing on the form and content of several novels published between 2013 and 2023.