Assistant Professor of History, Chinese University of Hong Kong
Gary Luk is a historian of Hong Kong, late imperial and modern China, and the Asian maritime world. His thematic interests include frontiers and borderlands, empires and colonialism, race and ethnicity, and the Chinese diaspora. He is completing a monograph that employs the analytical frameworks of “frontier” and “borderland” to reinterpret the nature of the Opium War (1839-1842) and its significance in Qing frontier history, British imperial and colonial history, and Asian maritime history. He is developing a research project on the making of littoral space and people in nineteenth-century Hong Kong, and another one on the political-cultural representations of the Dan as a littoral “nationality” in twentieth-century China. His future research directions include the Opium War in the Jiangnan region and the Chinese in the Canadian Prairies.