Having obtained an MA in Anthropology at CUHK in 2021, I am excited to be returning to undertake archaeological research through the MPhil program.

I arrived relatively late to my chosen field, having spent most of my career in the United States serving in government, policy research, and education. Throughout my professional life I have been a communicator of information and ideas to audiences young and old, working with scholars and public servants at their professional zenith to distill and better communicate their ideas, as well as the many young people who later came through my classroom, still to develop their own. At times a public spokesperson and adviser, a publisher and media planner, an educator— in many ways, mine has been a career built around telling stories.

Now that I am embarking upon my own research journey, I want to uncover stories of a different kind—those of prehistoric Hong Kong and the people who dwelt there. Over the course of the program, I hope to reveal how choice and circumstance impacted their interactions with their neighbours and their environment, to observe something of who they were—the connections they made, how they understood their own place and how they chose to memorialize it—and in doing so perhaps uncover how their experiences might inform our own today. I do not yet know what stories my research will reveal, but I feel certain they will be tales worth telling.