Matthew Wong Foreman
Lecturer
Additional Role
Matthew is a scholar and writer of fiction and nonfiction. His historical research explores the impact of global race science and eugenics on the formation of political and personal identity. He has published multiple prize-winning articles on these topics as they relate to Hong Kong and China.
His debut novel, Sunset at Lion Rock, won the 2023 International Proverse Prize and was published in 2024 (Proverse Hong Kong, distributed by CUHK Press). A North American edition was released by 7.13 Books in September 2026. His work has been featured by RTHK and showcased at the Hong Kong International Literary Festival.
Matthew’s current work examines the conceptual emergence of “race-mixing” in China from 1895 to 1949, and its central but critically understudied role in the formation of the Chinese nation-state. A monograph, To Mix or Not to Mix: The Making of the Chinese Race, 1895-1949, will be published in early 2027 (Leiden: Brill).
EDUCATION
BA, The University of Hong Kong
MSt, University of Oxford
PhD, Northwestern University
RESEARCH INTERESTS
Science and technology
Race
Ideas
Hong Kong and China
Books
To Mix or Not to Mix: Race Science, Miscegenation, and the Making of the Chinese Race
Brill
2027
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BOOK AWARDS
- International Proverse Prize (2023) — Sunset at Lion Rock
COURSES TAUGHT
- HIST2161, Making Race
- HIST2068, The Intellectual History of Twentieth-Century China
- HIST2220, History Through Fiction
FELLOWSHIPS & GRANTS
EXTERNAL AFFILIATIONS
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
- To Mix or Not to Mix: Race Science, Miscegenation, and the Making of the Chinese Race. (Leiden: Brill, Forthcoming 2027)
- Sunset at Lion Rock (7.13 Books, 2026)
- Foreman, M. W. (2023). The Making of the Eurasian in Fin-de-Siècle Hong Kong. Pacific Historical Review, 92(4), 576-609. https://doi.org/10.1525/phr.2023.92.4.576.
- Foreman, M. W., and Nasser, Y. A. (2022). The Chinese Archive: A Pocket Manual. Council on Library and Informational Resources, Library of Congress, Washington DC. Part of the Pocket Burgundy series, which features concise publications on various topics within the information and cultural heritage communities.
- Foreman, M. W. (2020). Racial modernity in Republican China, 1927-1937. Asian Ethnicity, 23(2), 377–397. https://doi.org/10.1080/14631369.2020.1792765. (2019 Percy Buchanan Prize for best article in China and Inner Asia, Midwest Conference on Asian Affairs)
AWARDS
- W. Turrentine Jackson Article Prize (2024), Pacific Historical Review
- Mellon Dissertation Fellowship in the Humanities (2019-2020), The Council on Library and Information Resources
- Kathryn Davis Fellowship for Peace (2019), Middlebury Language Schools