Tong Lam has been appointed as Acting Director, Dr. David Chu Program in Asia Pacific Studies, for fall 2016. Associate Professor of History, with an undergraduate appointment at the Department of Historical Studies, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Tong Lam’s research areas include the modern and contemporary history of China, science and technology, politics and aesthetics, cities, and empire. His first book, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation-State, 1900-1949 (2011), analyzes the profound consequences of the emergence of the technology of the “social fact” and social survey research in modern China. Professor Lam’s current research examines China’s urban infrastructures, ruins and ruination, as well as the renewed imperial ambitions of the later Qing empire. As a visual artist, he uses photographic and cinematographic techniques to dissect contemporary China’s hysterical transformation, as well as Cold War ruins around the world. He has published a photo-essay book, Abandoned Futures (2013), and has exhibited his work internationally.

Jennifer Purtle has been appointed as Acting Director, Dr. David Chu Program in Asia Pacific Studies, for winter 2017. An Associate Professor of Art, Jenny is a specialist in Chinese painting whose work addresses the relationship of objects, texts, and methods/theory through a presentist approach to history. Broadly educated in the history of Chinese art, including formal study of Chinese archaeology and material culture and training in multiple languages, ancient and modern, Jenny addresses artistic geographies and mobility – how and why objects and artists move, and what happens when they do. In this vein, she is currently researching forms of cosmopolitanism in Sino-Mongol cities. At the same time, her recent co-edited volume, Looking Modern: East Asian Visual Culture from the Treaty Ports to World War II, provides a different perspective on artistic mobility, examining the engagement of China, Japan, and Korea with Western notions of modernity in the visual field.