Elizabeth LaCouture

Programme Director, Gender Studies Programme

Associate Professor, Gender Studies Programme and Department of History, School of Humanities, Faculty of Arts

Biography

Dr Elizabeth LaCouture is a historian of gender, intersectionality and everyday life in modern China, Hong Kong, and East Asia. Her book Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960 offers new perspectives on gender and class, colonialism and empire, visual and material culture. She is currently researching the history of women’s magazines in Hong Kong and gender, race, and beauty across the Sinophone.

Dr LaCouture supervises MPhil and PhD students working on gender or urban history of Hong Kong or China, as well as those who are interested in interdisciplinary research on racialized inequalities in Asia.

Research Interests

• Gender
• Intersectionality and race
• Beauty
• Visual and material culture
• Architecture
• Hong Kong women’s magazines

Education

B.A. Barnard College, Columbia University;

MIA, M.A., MPhil, PhD Columbia University

Selected Publications

• Dwelling in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960. Columbia University Press 2022
• “Translating Domesticity in Chinese History and Historiography,” The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 4, October 2019
• with Annelise Heinz, “Introduction to Roundtable on Unsettling Domesticities: New Histories of Home in Global Contexts,” The American Historical Review, Volume 124, Issue 4, October 2019
• “Inventing the ‘Foreignized’ Chinese Carpet in Treaty-port Tianjin, China”, Journal of Design History, February 2017
• “Tianjin’s Western-Style Chinese Villa”, China Heritage Quarterly No. 21, March 2010

Courses

CLIT1002  Introduction to Gender: Body, Space, Discourse, and Movement

GEND1001  Introduction to Gender Studies

GEND2002  Gender, race and beauty

GEND3001  Internship in Gender Studies

GEND3002  Work and our futures

GEND3901  Gender Studies research (capstone experience)