John ERNI

Professor John Erni (PhD – Illinois; MA – Oregon; LL.M. – HKU; BA – Whitworth) is the Fung Hon Chu Endowed Chair of Humanics, the Chair Professor in Humanities, and the Head of the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing from 2014 to 2020) at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU). Previously, he taught at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Wisconsin in the United States of America (USA), City University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University in Hong Kong. In 2014, he was elected as Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities. In 2017, he was elected as the Academy's President. In 2019, he was elected the Corresponding Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, a rare honour given to someone of stature outside Australia.

A former recipient of the Rockefeller Humanities Research Fellowship, Professor Erni worked at Columbia University's School of Public Health in the Programme on Gender, Sexuality, Health, and Human Rights. He was also the Visiting Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication in 2008; the Inaugural Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Lincoln in 2018; and the William Lim Siu Wai Visiting Professorial Fellow in Cultural Studies in Asia at the National University of Singapore in 2018. In 2001 to 2005, he was elected to the Executive Board of the International Communication Association (ICA; based in Washington DC, USA) and in 2019, he was elected the Board Member-at-large for ICA. He received the prestigious President's Award for Outstanding Performance in Research Supervision from HKBU in 2019.

Professor Erni has published widely on international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth popular consumption in Hong Kong and Asia, cultural politics of race/ethnicity/migration, and critical public health. He is the author or editor of nine academic titles, most recently Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights (Routledge, 2019) and Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (Springer, 2017).