BIOGRAPHY

Dr HUNG Tak Wai (孔德維) is an Assistant Professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study (WIAS), Waseda University in Tokyo. Born and educated in Hong Kong, he is a historian and historical anthropologist of East and Southeast Asia. His work is driven by a fundamental human question: how do people of different religious, ethnic, and linguistic backgrounds build durable coexistence in everyday life without first agreeing on belief?

Combining multilingual archival microhistory with oral history and comparative fieldwork, his research traces grassroots architectures of coexistence across China, Japan, Taiwan, maritime Southeast Asia, and Europe. He is the author of Redefining Heresy and Tolerance: Governance of Muslims and Christians in the Qing Empire before 1864 (Hong Kong University Press, 2024) and explores the concept of "participatory diversity" through extensive fieldwork.

Across all his projects, Dr Hung remains committed to bridging academic scholarship with community-led heritage curation, public broadcasting, and independent publishing. He holds a PhD in Chinese Studies from The University of Hong Kong.