Speaker:

Dr Peter Cunich

Moderator:

Professor John Carroll, School of Humanities (History), HKU

Date:

5 February 2015 (Thursday)

Time:

6:30 - 8:00 pm

Venue:

Special Collections, 1/F, Main Library, The University of Hong Kong

Language:

English

Peter Cunich has been teaching history at the University of Hong Kong since 1993, but his first visit to the then British colony was during an airline stopover in 1986. Although his main field of research is late medieval and early modern English history, he has taken a keen interest in the history of Hong Kong and European missionary activity in China. He is currently Director of the HKU Centenary History Project, spending much of his spare time researching and writing the second volume of his definitive history of the University.

Peter Cunich’s latest book, Old Hong Kong, combines a stunning collection of photographic images of colonial Hong Kong from the FormAsia Collection with a descriptive text offering fresh insights into the early history of Hong Kong. Many of these images have never been published before, so they add significantly to our knowledge of Hong Kong’s built environment and social milieu from the 1860s to the early 1940s, but they also create numerous problems of identification and interpretation. In this book talk, Dr Cunich will discuss the reasons for the recent surge of interest in historical photographs of Hong Kong and the ways in which these images can be used by historians and others to elucidate various elements of our local history.