Florence Mok

Florence Mok is a Nanyang Assistant Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University. She is a historian of colonial Hong Kong and modern China, with an interest in environmental history, the Cold War and state-society relations. She received her BA and MA in History from Durham University. She completed her PhD in History at the University of York. Her doctoral research examined governance and political culture in the 1970s Hong Kong. Her postdoctoral project explored Chinese Communist cultural activities in colonial Hong Kong during the Cold War. She is currently studying the history of natural disasters and crisis management. The study explores how the colonial government and the Chinese society in Hong Kong mitigated environmental crises (water shortage and seasonal epidemics) from 1945 to 1980. This innovative study will shed light on the current global pandemics by tracing past practices used to alleviate emergencies in a densely populated and newly-urbanised environment which had an under-developed welfare system, supported by a narrow tax base.

Florence is currently a Fellow of NISTH (Institute of Science and Technology for Humanity). She has also been a Visiting Fellow/Scholar at the University of Hong Kong, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Lund University. She is one of the founders of the Hong Kong Research Hub (HKRH) at NTU. She has published peer-reviewed articles in well-respected interdisciplinary and historical journals; the China Information article won the Eduard B. Vermeer Best Article Prize in 2019 and ICAS Best Article Prize on Global Hong Kong Studies in 2021. Her first monograph, Covert Colonialism: Governance, Surveillance and Political Culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97 has just been published by Manchester University Press (Studies in Imperialism series). She has reviewed manuscripts for a number of journals and presses, including Archives and Records, Asian Culture, Asian Ethnicity, Asian Studies Review, The American Historical Review, The Historical Journal, Twentieth-century Communism and the Hong Kong University Press. She is also the Series Editor of the ‘Cold War in Asia and Beyond’  book series in Amsterdam University Press.