Wing Lam Michelle Chan

Research Topic

Print Work and Print Culture in Industrial Hong Kong, c. 1950s-1970s

Supervisor: Jennifer Altehenger

I am interested in print media, industrialisation, work and consumer culture in Hong Kong. In my DPhil project, I focus on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s, a time of successive industrial transitions and growing commodification. By centring printed items (textual goods, usable items, packaging and ephemera), my project not only engages with press and publishing as discursive mediums, but also uses print’s materiality to probe changes in creative work and consumerism during these post-war decades. Because Hong Kong's industries serviced domestic and export markets alike, I also pay attention to how these varying transnational scopes affected the forms and work of print culture. On one level, I ask how workers shaped their press and publishing fields and print media itself amidst the cultural Cold War. On another, I examine the professionalisation of graphic and packaging design within a wider industrial development project of the global 1970s. To these ends, I use oral histories, industry files, business archives, newspapers and design ephemera. 

My DPhil study is funded by the Clarendon Scholarship and the Magdalen College Graduate Scholarship in History, and my work is supervised by Dr Jennifer Altehenger. Also at Oxford, I developed my interest in print culture beyond its textual dimension during my MSt in Global and Imperial History and my BA in History and Economics. My masters work probed tensions between Hong Kong Chinese businessmen and cultural production during the Interwar, and my undergraduate research investigated diglossia and political journalism in 1905 Hong Kong amidst a transnational boycott movement. My research thus adopts an integrated lens on production and consumption, highlighting everyday voices within Hong Kong's local and transborder contexts.