HKUArts has notable strengths and research excellence, as demonstrated by high output, RAE ratings, and success in grant applications.

Our innovative, high-impact, and leading-edge research within and across the humanities and other disciplines, reflects the Faculty’s distinctive brand of Asia-West scholarship supporting its role as an international ‘gateway,’ or ‘forum.’

The Faculty hosts a veriety of research clusters and networks: AI&Humanity Lab; Research and Impact Initiative on Communication in Healthcare (RIICH); Centre for the Study of Globalization and Cultures; China, Humanities and Global Studies Hub; Academy of Cultural Heritage; Chinese Philosophy Initiative; Institute for Transnational History of China; and our cross-faculty Centre for the Humanities and Medicine. Strategically, these research clusters function to draw together scholars at the cutting edge of their fields to Hong Kong, and serve as catalysts for transdisciplinary research, drawing on and supporting the research of faculty members across the University.

The Faculty’s research focuses on three key strategic areas:

Asia-West/Trans-Asia

While the Faculty’s research was long rooted in intersections between ‘East’ and ‘West,’ at the highest level our research strategy also focuses on regional and transnational perspectives, and cosmopolitan and postcolonial histories, with a principal focus on Asian cultures. Research in Arts is informed by unique regional aspects – sensitivity to Chinese and southeast Asian approaches on one hand, and ‘western’ on the other.

AI and Humanities

As a faculty, we are committed to establishing ourselves as global leaders in integrating, researching, and teaching AI within the humanities. Across all disciplines, we are appointing scholars who not only use AI in their research and teaching but also critically examine AI from a humanistic perspective. Artificial intelligence presents a transformative opportunity for the humanities, reshaping not only our research methodologies but also the very questions we ask and the way we educate future generations. We have established one of the world's leading research centers focused on humanistic AI, fostering cutting-edge exploration at the intersection of technology and human values.

Colonial and Post-colonial Transnational/Comparative Studies

A large proportion of our Faculty’s researchers place special emphasis in their research upon transnational perspectives, and cosmopolitan and postcolonial histories, emerging from multilingual and multiethnic environments. For decades of its history HKU served as a source of information on the Arts and letters imported into China, and a space in which Chinese humanistic studies interacted with equivalents from outside. Our distinctive identity derives from the study of Asia-West and particularly China-West interactions from international and transnational humanities perspectives. Few other faculties worldwide can claim to have such a high percentage of scholars who explore Chinese and Western cultures from international, transnational, and East-West perspectives.