Elizabeth LaCouture

Programme Director, Gender Studies Programme

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

Biography

Dr Elizabeth LaCouture is a historian of gender, visual and material culture, architecture, and everyday life in modern China and East Asia. She has published articles in China Heritage Quarterly and The Journal of Design History, and her book At Home in the World: Family, House, and Home in Tianjin, China, 1860-1960 is forthcoming. Her current research is on the history of beauty and cosmetics in the Chinese world. Before joining the History Department at HKU, she taught history and East Asian studies at Colby College in the United States and was a research fellow in the Academy of Korean Studies funded Korean Family in Comparative Perspective research group at the University of Illinois. Her research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Fulbright-Hays US Department of Education.

Research Interests

• Gender
• Visual and material culture
• Architecture
• Everyday life in modern China and East Asia

Education

B.A. Barnard College, Columbia University;

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

Selected Publications

• “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

GEND3901. Gender Studies research (capstone experience)