Dean’s Message

Greetings! As the newly arrived Dean of the Faculty of Humanities, I write with excitement to accompany the many energetic developments you will find reported in this newsletter. With over 240 academic, teaching, research, project and administrative staff, FHM continues to build upon our strengths in language studies, language education, literature, history, creative writing, and cultural studies to offer a range of high-quality undergraduate, postgraduate, and professional development programmes to enrich teacher education with meaningful and rigorous humanistic inquiries. Please join me in recognising the many activities and achievements of our staff, students, and alumni.

Among our new initiatives are two new strategic focuses on “digital humanities” and “comparative cultures of care,” which involve a wide range of critical applications in the educational, cultural, literary, environmental, and historical aspects of public life. These two areas will anchor our educational and research agenda for some time to come. Along with these, FHM is launching two new programmes for implementation from 2022/23: a new undergraduate programme, Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in English Studies and Digital Communication, and a new master’s programme, Master of Arts in Global Histories of Education.

FHM was established in 2012. Celebrating our 10th anniversary this year, our young Faculty is poised to scale new heights. We follow some key directions as we move forward, including:

• Being energetic – It’s time to innovate. Taking our core strength in language studies and language education, we bring in a number of ideas to renew our pedagogy, including digital literacy, digital cultural studies, theories of care and wellbeing, and creative studies.
• Being responsive to changes. As humanists, we reflect rigorously on the rapidly changing contours of university life as well as life outside of the academy. This is acutely relevant to the post-COVID times, for the global pandemic has altered our teaching, learning, research, and public engagements in myriad ways. 
• Being bold – Taking a long view. With our established contribution over the years in research development and public knowledge transfer, especially to the education sector, we are self-assured and poised to move to a higher level of recognition. By being forward-looking, especially with a long view, we aim to develop humanistic and ethical education that will be noticed for its capacity to respond to the complexities of the world.
• Being on the “Education-plus” horizon – Diversify! The work of our Faculty greatly exemplifies the important spirit of the Education-plus model unique to EdUHK. We will continue to strive to add new dimensions to our portfolio, by augmenting it with many forms of text-based and non-text critical inquiries in order to diversify education as a social practice.
• Being evidence-based – To inform decision making. We will be rigorous in supplementing our narrative of change and growth with clear quantitative documentation that can assist us in tracking, assessing, and analysing what works and what does not in our approach. Compiling and continually updating our qualitative and quantitative database will be a priority as we make decisions that will be intelligible and appreciated by many stakeholders. 

Professor John Erni
Dean, Faculty of Humanities