CGED Research Seminar Series

Women at the University of Hong Kong, 1911-1995

Speaker: Dr. Peter Cunich (Associate Professor, Department of History, HKU)

Respondent: Dr. Staci Ford (Honorary Associate Professor, Department of History, HKU)

Date: 26 February 2019 (Tuesday)

Time: 5:00pm – 6:30pm

Venue: Rm4.36, 4/F, Run Run Shaw Tower, Centennial Campus, HKU

When the University of Hong Kong was founded in 1911 there was no expectation that women would ever be involved in the educational work of the institution, either as teachers or students, The first female students and teachers did not arrive until 1921, but their status within the University remained marginal until well after the Second World War. Rising numbers of female undergraduates from the 1950s and a growing cadre of women teachers (although generally working in junior teaching posts and subject to inferior terms of service) gradually altered the gender balance at HKU until women students were in the majority by the early 1990s and female academics began to challenge the predominantly male power structures of the institution. This lecture seeks to give an overview of theposition of women at HKU during the University's first eighty years, and explores the ways in which gender, race and class were formative influences in the perception of woman's place in HongKong's post-war academic sector. 

Peter Cunich has been teaching history at the University of Hong Kong for twenty-five years. He is the author of three books on the history of HKU, and several other works on the medieval history of the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, but his main research interest is the history of the religious orders in England before and after the Reformation. He has published extensively on the all-male Carthusian order, the predominently female Bridgettine order, and the male and female branches of the English Benedictine Congregation. During more than three decades of  research into both monastic and university history he has been struck by the way in which the most successful institutions are those in which men and women work together to achieve their corporate aims.