Nirmali Fenn
Beginning her life in an orphanage in Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, Nirmali Fenn was raised and educated in Australia, gaining highest honours in musical composition from the Universities of New South Wales and Melbourne. A Clarendon Scholarship and an Overseas Research Students Award enabled her to complete a doctorate at Oxford University. After receiving Second Prize at the 26th Concorso Internazionale di Composizione in Turin in 2008, she is becoming increasingly known on the international stage, and has taken up appointments as Composer in Residence for the Saxophone Habanera Festival in Poitiers, France, and the Lake District Summer Music Festival, UK. Her compositions have impressed many of the world’s leading ensembles specializing in contemporary music, including the Arditti Quartet, Ensemble Cairn, Ensemble Linea, Kuss Quartet, Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tin Alley String Quartet, Sounds Underground and Endymion Ensemble.
During her time at Hong Kong University as a Scholar in the Department of Humanities, Nirmali will be writing 4 pieces in total: 2 orchestral and 2 music theatre. She is published by Edition HH, UK.
TopTao Gong
Tao Gong received his PhD at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. After postdoctoral work in Italy, Germany and the UK, he joined the Society of the Scholars in September 2010. His research interests include evolutionary linguistics, neurolinguistics, and complexity theory. By means of computer simulation, he conducts research on lexicon-syntax coevolution, categorization, the neural bases of linguistic behavior, and socio-cultural transmission. He is currently engaged in projects on complexity in isolating languages, tone evolution, and neurolinguistics.
Arnika Fuhrmann
Arnika Fuhrmann is an interdisciplinary scholar of Thailand working at the intersections of the country’s aesthetic and political modernities. After completing her Ph.D. in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago (2008), she took up a postdoctoral fellowship at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. In September 2010 she joined the University of Hong Kong’s Society of Scholars in the Humanities as a research scholar. Her book project Ghostly Desires examines how Buddhist-coded anachronisms of haunting figure struggles over sexuality in contemporary Thai cinema. Her new research project, Under Permanent Exception: Violence, Buddhist-Muslim Coexistence, and (New) Media in the Thai South, extends her interests in sexuality and cinema into the domain of inter-religious conflict. It proposes a reframing of understandings of Buddhist-Muslim antagonisms through the analysis of their quotidian, affective dimensions and through concentration on the ways in which non-state actors approach coexistence.
Dan Marshall
Dan Marshall primarily works in metaphysics and in related areas in logic and the philosophy language. Topics he is currently working on include the metaphysics of possible worlds and time, counterpart theory, and the theory of intrinsic properties. Before coming to the University of Hong Kong, he undertook his Ph.D. studies at the Australian National University. Before that, he completed a masters degree in mathematics at the University of Melbourne, and a bachelor degree with honours in philosophy and mathematics also at the University of Melbourne.
Alma Mikulinsky
Alma Mikulinsky specializes in early 20th century European art with additional expertise in international contemporary art. While her PhD thesis, written at the University of Toronto, was devoted to the study of the photographic representation of Pablo Picasso’s sculptures, her research interest encompass interwar continental philosophy, early 20th century ethnographic discourses, strategies of art display, and theories of the avant-garde. She has been the recipient of, among others, a residence scholarship at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, and a graduate fellowship at the Jackman Humanities Institute at the University of Toronto. During her time in Hong Kong University, She intend to revise her dissertation into a book, write articles on ethnography and surrealism as well as on Middle Eastern art, and commence a new research project on Picasso’s sculptures created during the Second World War. Alongside her academic work, she works as an art consultant, art critic, and translator; her texts and translations have been commissioned by art journals, international museums and prominent commercial galleries.
Theodora Jim
Theodora Jim is an ancient historian from Hong Kong working on Ancient Greek History. Shortly after beginning her B.A. in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Hong Kong, she was awarded the Swire Scholarships which enabled her to pursue both her undergraduate and postgraduate studies at the University of Oxford. There she received her training in Classics and converted from a modern historian into an ancient historian. Alongside her research she has travelled extensively in Greece and Turkey, examining monuments, inscriptions on stone, and the archaeology of cults. Actively engaged in anthropological approaches and questions of religious psychology, she studies Greek Religion in comparative and interdisciplinary contexts; in particular, she is interested in how the Greeks’ religious behaviour was shaped by their thoughts and beliefs. Her doctoral thesis investigates ‘first-fruits’ and ‘tithing’ practices in ancient Greece in c.700-300 B.C.
After eight years of studies at Oxford, she has now returned to the University of Hong Kong as part of the Society of Scholars. Of late she has started a new project on the concept of ‘salvation’ in ancient Greece and the comparison between Greek ‘salvation’ beliefs and practices and those in Christianity and Chinese religions.