Prof Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu awarded Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship

Prof Emilie Yeh Yueh-yu, Dean of Faculty of Arts and Lam Wong Yiu Wah Chair Professor of Visual Studies, has received the Research Grants Council’s 2021/22 Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship (HSSPFS) for the project “Cinema and the Colonial Dispositif: Early Screen Culture in Hong Kong (1897 to 1925)”. Prof Yeh’s grant of HK$513,000 is the largest of the nine HSSPFS awards. The project aims to complete a monograph of Hong Kong’s early film exhibition and culture, focusing on the first two decades after the arrival of motion pictures in Hong Kong. 

Prof Yeh has led a research team and completed an open-access database “A History of Film Exhibition and Reception in Colonial Hong Kong” earlier with the Department of Visual Studies, the Centre for Film and Creative Industries and the University Library.  The database gives essential information about Hong Kong’s film history from the initial screening of motion pictures in the late 1890s to the mid-1920s when the local film industry took shape. It provides online access to more than 29,000 news items, covering cinemas, distribution companies and circuits, advertisements, and film reviews.