Professor & Programme Director of MAT
BA (Beijing Foreign Studies University), PhD (HK)
email: gsong@hku.hk
Research interest: Chinese Television Culture, Gender and Sexuality, Masculinities in East Asia, Translation and Cross-cultural Studies
Professor Geng Song is Chair of the Board of the Faculty of Arts and the Director of the MA in the field of Translation (MAT) Programme. He taught in Singapore and Australia for over ten years before coming to HKU in September 2012. He is a Guest Professor at Shanghai University and was a Luce East Asia Fellow of the National Humanities Center (USA) in 2022/23.
Song is interested in transcultural, transdisciplinary, and transhistorical inquiries on gender and identity in Chinese popular culture. He has written extensively on issues such as men and masculinities in Chinese culture and society, Chinese television, and Chinese nationalism. His first book, The Fragile Scholar: Power and Masculinity in Chinese Culture (2004), is now considered a pioneering work in the field of Chinese masculinity studies, with its conclusions drawn from materials on the caizi discourse serving as the “cornerstone for any future critical studies on Chinese masculinity” (Jing Wang, back cover blurb). His second book, Men and Masculinities in Contemporary China (co-authored with Derek Hird, 2014), represents a much-applauded attempt to combine in an interdisciplinary manner a critical reading of male images in media texts with interviews with and ethnographic examinations of men in the context of everyday life in mainland China. It has been extensively reviewed and hailed as a “valuable guide to the new configurations of manhood that have emerged in urban China over the past couple of decades of explosive economic growth and dizzying social change” (Matthew Sommer, book review). His newest monograph, Televising Chineseness: Gender, Nation, and Subjectivity (2022) explores how television and Web dramas imagine the Chinese nation and form postsocialist Chinese gendered subjects. He is currently working on a new project on how algorithms rewrite history in Chinese digital media.
Song’s publications also include edited volumes on Chinese television and transnational Chinese masculinities, a translated anthology of works by China’s post-80s writers, and a number of research articles in such journals as Modern China, The China Journal, Men and Masculinities, Asian Studies Review, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies and Nan Nü. He is the recipient of two GRF grants, as well as international collaboration grants from the British Academy, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the Academy of Korean Studies and has delivered keynote/invited lectures in the UK, Australia, the USA, and China.
Song is the co-editor of a book series on “Transnational Asian Masculinities” by Hong Kong University Press. His research has been widely featured by major international media outlets, such as the South China Morning Post, The Guardian, Nikki Asian Review, China Daily, Radio Australia, and The Straits Times, to name just a few.
Scopus: https://www.scopus.com/authid/detail.uri?authorId=36127949600
Google Scholar: Geng Song – Google 學術搜尋