Lam, Tong

Tong Lam was born and raised in Macao, formerly a Portuguese enclave near Hong Kong on the south China coast until it was returned to China in 1999. Being at the margins of several worlds, he has always been interested in issues of cultural representation, nationalism, colonialism, and globalization. He worked briefly in Macao as a TV news reporter before embarking his graduate study at the University of Kansas in 1994, where he received his MA degree in History. His dissertation, completed in 2003 at the University of Chicago, is an examination of the significance of the rise of social survey research in the construction of the Chinese nation-state in the early twentieth-century. At present, his research and teaching interests include modern China, East Asia, empire and nation, the history of social sciences, globalization, cultural studies, war and memory, and historiography. He has written articles on nationalism and the emerging neoliberal social order in post-socialist China. Before joining the University of Toronto, he taught at the University of Richmond, a liberal arts institution in Virginia, USA.