Bobby TAM
Lecturer
Additional Role
Bobby Tam specializes in the history of death and the history of emotions. His first academic monograph Death and Emotions in Anglo-China explores emotions surrounding death in British colonial and semi-colonial settings in China during the nineteenth century. His previous works include how dead bodies were managed in early colonial Hong Kong. He has also written about the meanings and vocabulary associated with the dead body in urban China during the Late Qing and Early Republican period. His current new research is about history of suicide in nineteenth-century and pre-war Hong Kong.
Room 10.48, Run Run Shaw Tower
EDUCATION
BA, The University of Hong Kong
MPhil, The University of Hong Kong
PhD, University of Warwick
RESEARCH INTERESTS
History of death
History of emotions
Nineteenth century
British colonial history
Late imperial and modern Chinese history
Books
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BOOK AWARDS
COURSES TAUGHT
- HIST1017, Modern Hong Kong
- HIST2209, Nineteenth-Century Colonial Hong Kong
- HIST2214, Death and the Dead in Modern History, 1800-2000
- HIST7023, Death and Dying in Hong Kong History (MA)
- HIST7024, History of Hong Kong Literature (MA)
- HIST7998, Capstone Experience: Public History Project (MA)
FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS
EXTERNAL AFFILIATIONS
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- Death and Emotions in Anglo-China: Negotiating Grief Across Cultures in the Nineteenth Century (London: Bloomsbury, 2026)
- “Inventing Sacredness in a Colonial City: A British Garden Cemetery in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Urban History 52, no. 4 (2025): 622–643
- “Afterlife of the Wealthy: the burial of merchant communities in nineteenth-century colonial Hong Kong,” in Chronicling Westerners in Nineteenth-Century East Asia, edited by Robert S.G. Fletcher and Robert Hellyer (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), 105–124.
- “Between Fear and Respect: Vocabulary and Meanings of the Dead Body in Urban China from the Late Qing to the Early Republican Era,” British Journal of Chinese Studies 12, no. 1 (2022): 20–39.