FHM Researchers - Prof John N. ERNI

Dean, Faculty of Humanities
Chair Professor of Cultural Studies 
Department of Literature and Cultural Studies (LCS)

Postgraduate students are motivated by their research projects, their overall intellectual development, and a vision for a career. Supervision thus requires focus and steady mentorship, with the goal of helping to drive their research forward and to help them realize results.  Here, results are not only limited to the completion of the thesis, but also to the cultivation of a ‘research life’. In this way, I act as a role model on how to think, read, write, and speak on scholarly matters, and take mentorship seriously as a shared process through teaching, inspiring, but also listening. 

As supervisors, we need to understand each student’s unique personal and learning background, in order to offer them freedom to explore, ask, and experiment, before they shape, focus, and sharpen. As a recognition of my effort in postgraduate supervision, I was awarded the President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Research Supervision at HKBU in 2019.

Research areas:

• International and Asia-based media and cultural studies;
• critical legal theory centering on human rights philosophy, ethics and politics;
• gender and sexuality studies related to media and visual culture;
• youth studies in transnational contexts;
• digital humanities for social diversity;
• cultural politics of race/ethnicity/migration;
• critical public health studies.

Brief Biography and Relevant Experiences:

Prof Erni is a thinker, writer, teacher, and advocate. Prior to joining EdUHK, he was Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair of Humanics, Chair Professor in Humanities, and Head of the Department of Humanities & Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. A recipient of the Gustafson, Rockefeller, Lincoln, and Annenberg research fellowships, and other awards and grants, Prof Erni is an interdisciplinary scholar and has published widely in a number of advanced areas, including international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, cultural politics of race/ethnicity/migration, and so on. He is the author or editor of 10 academic titles, among them The Cultural Politics of COVID-19 (with Ted Striphas, 2022); Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights (2019); Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (2017); Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, 2014).

FHM RPg Programmes

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