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Ho-fung Hung received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 2004. He joins Indiana University as an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. With an initial interest in electronic engineering, his career choice changed due to his experience of living in Hong Kong during the 1980s when the upcoming handover of Hong Kong created intense and stimulating debate regarding issues of identity for Hong Kong and China. He began graduate work in Hong Kong and moved with his adviser, Giovanni Arrighi, to Johns Hopkins, where his research interest was influenced by strong training in methodologies for studying social change and William Rowe's work on intellectual history and eighteenth-century China.

His research has focused on how ideology shaped contentious politics in early eighteenth-and nineteenth-century China, in particular the role played by petitioning as a means of protest, as well as China 's transition to modernity and the impact of orientalist social theories on concepts of China. While in Hong Kong doing fieldwork and teaching at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology as a visiting scholar in 2003, he found himself unable to travel to Beijing or Taipei to continue his research due to the SARS outbreak. He therefore began a study of the SARS epidemic which resulted in his participating in a project, funded by the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, to study the epidemic. Ho-fung Hung will speak on this issue on January 27 as part of the East Asian Studies Center's Colloquium Series.

Hung looks forward to working with fellow East Asianists here at Indiana University, particularly since his interests range from Qing China to contemporary China, and from issues of central politics to peripheral studies involving Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

He and his wife have a two-year-old son who, before Bloomington, enjoyed viewing people on his stroller rides through Hong Kong's malls. Bloomington has introduced their son to the joy of viewing trees as well as people, and the family enjoyed their first autumn experience in Bloomington.

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