HKUST School of Humanities and Social Science Welcomes 7 New Assistant Professors
The HKUST School of Humanities and Social Science is pleased to welcome seven new Assistant Professors who have joined us since January of 2025. Three are in the Division of Humanities and four are in the Division of Social Science. Their interests include Qing and early 20th century Chinese history, digital humanities, visual studies, political psychology, computational social science, development economics, and social demography. They are also diverse in terms of geographic origins, hailing from Hong Kong, mainland China, Taiwan, Vietnam, South Korea, and Germany. See below for more about them and their research, and links to their web pages. We are happy that they have joined us and look forward to working with them in the coming years!
Division of Humanities
Michael Chung is a historian who received his PhD from Emory University in 2025, and his BA and MPhil from the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2012 and 2016 respectively. Chung’s research centres on the early Qing dynasty, with a focus on the transfer of European artillery technology and the formation of the Hanjun Eight Banners. As a digital humanist, Chung is currently developing a database of 17th- and 18th-century bannermen using text mining, and a Manchu OCR system based on a fine-tuned vision-language model. (Full profile: https://huma.hkust.edu.hk/people/michael-chung)
Thorben Pelzer is a historian of Modern China (PhD 2022) with an emphasis on digital and global history, including the role of infrastructure and space. He has worked in Leipzig, Shanghai, and Tokyo, conducted research in Beijing, Taipei, and the USA, and coordinated the China Centre at Kiel University. His monographs include Engineering Trouble: US–Chinese Experiences of Professional Discontent (2023) and 100 Maps about China (in German, 2022). He is an alumnus of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, as well as the treasurer of the German Association of Chinese Studies. (Full profile: https://pelzer.blog/)
K. T. Wong is in visual studies. received his PhD in Visual Studies from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to joining HKUST, he was a postdoctoral fellow at Cornell University. His current research focuses on videogames and animation, particularly the production, distribution, and consumption of such media, within the socioeconomic and geopolitical context of East and Southeast Asia. (Full profile: https://huma.hkust.edu.hk/people/kok-thong-wong)
Division of Social Science
Suji Kang is a political scientist. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Perry World House at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include political psychology, political behavior, and computational social science. Empirically, she uses a wide range of empirical methods, including experimental methods, survey methods, statistical methods, and text analysis. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science and an M.S. in Statistics from Northwestern University. (Full profile: https://sjkangnu.github.io/)
Yu-Hsiang Lei is a development economist. Before joining HKUST, he served as an Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore and Yale-NUS College. He obtained his PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics and received an undergraduate degree from National Taiwan University. His research interests also span the fields of political economy and public economics, with a special regional emphasis on China. His work mainly focuses on producing empirically grounded evidence to address critical challenges faced by developing countries and to provide insights to understand broader development and governance issues. (Full profile: https://sosc.hkust.edu.hk/people/yu-hsiang-lei )
Jiaxin Shi is a demographer. His work primarily contributes to three areas of research: (1) patterns of mortality and longevity, (2) impacts of large-scale population shocks, and (3) internal and international migration. These research areas are unified by his broader interest in how the social stratification system intersects with population dynamics across historical and contemporary contexts. He received his training at HKUST (MPhil Social Science), European Doctoral School of Demography, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Oxford (DPhil Sociology), and UW-Madison (postdoc). (Full profile: https://sites.google.com/view/jiaxinsh)
Duy D Trinh is a political scientist. His research centers on elite politics in single-party regimes, with a particular focus on contemporary Vietnam and China. His works have appeared in Comparative Political Studies, Democratization, and Problems of Post-Communism, as well as in an edited volume. He is a Southeast Asia Research Group (SEAREG) fellow and a Mansfield-Luce Asia Scholar. Dr. Trinh received his PhD in Political Science from the University of California, San Diego. Before joining HKUST, he was Data and Statistical Specialist at Princeton University's Niehaus Center for Globalization and Governance. (Full profile: https://duydtrinh.com/)
