Announcing the 2024-2025 Humanities Faculty Fellow

 

A headshot of Zhongping Chen, a Chinese man with grey-and-black hair wearing a blue blazer, grey sweater and white collared shirt, in front of a full bookcase.
Photo credit: Philip Cox

We are proud to announce that professor Zhongping Chen (陳忠平) (History) has been named the Humanities Faculty Fellow for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Chen will use the fellowship to complete research and revisions for his book project, The Transpacific Chinese Diaspora in Canada: From Origins to Rise and Reform, 1788-1898.

As Chen states in his application, the book’s “diasporic approach focuses on the Chinese transnational migration and cross-cultural ventures in the transpacific context, as well as their relations with the homeland, co-ethnic communities in the Pacific Rim, and Canadian society, including its Indigenous people and white settlers, between 1788 and 1898.”

The project examines Chinese migrants and their interactions with white and Indigenous peoples in the fur trade based in the Pacific Northwest, gold rushes in British Columbia, and the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway

Using the archives of the Chinese Freemasons and Victoria’s Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, as well as court documents from Kwong Lee & Co.—once the largest Victoria-based Chinese merchant company—the project’s diasporic approach focuses on the Chinese transnational migration and cross-cultural ventures in the transpacific context.

Congratulations, Dr. Chen! We look forward to learning more about this project as it develops.