Angelina Chin

Angelina Chin’s teaching and research interests revolve around the themes of colonialism, political movements, diaspora, feminism, sexuality, and disability in modern East Asia. Her research focuses on the social histories of marginal people, identities and citizenship, as well as transregional networks in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China and Japan.

In her first book, Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (2012), Chin explores the concept of “women’s emancipation” in early 20th-century South China and how lower-class women were both liberated and constrained by the social and political discourses on what women should become. In her second monograph, Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War (2023), she argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. You can read about this project in this interview.

She is currently working on two projects on disability. One is about the blind workers' labor movements in Hong Kong since the 1960s. The other is a multimedia project on assistive technologies and devices for people with disabilities. She has collaborated with social scientists and engineers in Japan, including the Institute of Ars Vivendi at Ritsumeikan University, the Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR), and the Department of Robotics at the Osaka Institute of Technology (OIT). You can read about some of her teaching collaborations.