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Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee, Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture, The Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) was invited to be a guest speaker for the University’s 50^th Anniversary Distinguished Lecture. Professor Lee presented a lecture on ‘The role of scholars / intellectuals in the Age of Globalization’ today (29 November) on campus. The lecture drew a full house of 300 academics, students, alumni, and members of the public. 

Professor Lee reopened the discussion of the late Edward Said’s thesis on the role of the intellectuals as essentially humanistic scholars and academia-based specialists who ‘speak truth to power’ by bringing it up-to-date to the present age of ‘globalization’. At the lecture, Professor Lee discussed the topic in a comparative context with relevance to the situation of higher education in Asia, specifically Hong Kong. Said’s views were coupled and compared with those of Michel Foucault, Edward Shils, Ch’ien Mu, Yu Ying-shih, contemporary Neo-Confucians and theorists of globalization, among others. He hoped the lecture will generate more discussion in the CUHK community on the crucial issues of higher education. 

Prof. Leo Ou-fan Lee is Sin Wai Kin Professor of Chinese Culture at CUHK. Before that he was a Wei Lun Professor of Humanities (2009-11) at the University. He is also a Fellow of Morningside College and a founding fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. He received a number of fellowships and prizes, including the Guggenheim Fellowship and an Honorary Doctorate in the Humanities from the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

Professor Lee received his PhD degree from Harvard University in 1970. He has taught at Harvard, UCLA, Chicago, Indiana, and Princeton Universities in the United States, as well as the University of Hong Kong (as Distinguished Visiting Professor) and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (as the Y. K. Pao Chair Professor of Cultural Studies). He took early retirement from Harvard in 2004 in order to return to Hong Kong and join the CUHK faculty for a second career as both an academic and a cultural critic at large, writing in both Chinese and English. 

His scholarly publications in English include: Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Form of Urban Culture, 1930-1945 (Harvard University Press, 1999), Voices from the Iron House: A Study of Lu Xun (Indiana University Press, 1987), and The Romantic Generation of Modern Chinese Writers (Harvard, 1973), all of which have been translated into Chinese. In Hong Kong, he has published a large volume of books in Chinese across a wide spectrum of subjects: modern Chinese literature, Hong Kong culture, film, music, and architecture.  Notable titles include: Ten Lectures on Modern Chinese Literature and Modernity (2002), Desolation and Sophistication: Revelations from Eileen Chang (2006), Watching ‘Lust/Caution’: Literature, Film, History (2008), Symphony: Notes on Music (2006), Literature Adapted into Film (2010), Humanities as Texts of Life (2009) and Humanities Today (2010).  A special book written for Hong Kong in English is City between Worlds: My Hong Kong (Harvard University Press, 2008), as is a collection of books reviews, Musings: Reading Hong Kong, China and the World (Hong Kong: Muse Books, 2011).

For more photos, please visit:
https://www.cpr.cuhk.edu.hk/en/events_recap_detail.php?1=1&id=157&s=