The History Department at Pomona College

It is with great sadness that I write to let you know that Professor Helena Wall has passed away last week.

From History Department Chair Arash Khazeni:
"Helena taught early American History in the department from 1984 until her retirement in 2020. Her courses on the social history of Colonial America inspired generations of Pomona students, several of whom went on to study history in graduate school and entered the profession. She was also a generous colleague with junior faculty and staff, mentoring and supporting them as they came through the department. Helena’s own research was focused on social and family history in Colonial America. She studied with John Demos at Brandeis as an undergraduate and completed her PhD dissertation at Harvard in 1983 under the supervision of Bernard Bailyn, which became the basis of her book Fierce Communion: Family and Community in Early America.
Those of us who knew and worked with Helena admired her deeply for her tenacious and passionate character, devotion to her students, and abiding friendship. As our department moves toward the future, despite this sunset, her presence is not forgotten."

Helena M. Wall | Pomona College in Claremont, California - Pomona College Emerita Professor of History [email protected] Office: Mason Hall 117 (909) 607-3907 With Pomona Since: 1984 Expertise Expertise Helena M. Wall specializes in the history of early America and American social history. She teaches courses on colonial and revolutionary America, captivity and ensla...

For more details, visit: http://assistivetechnologies.sites.pomona.edu/symposium-2024/

May 11 10pmPST/ May 12 1pmHKT
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Society for Hong Kong Studies series ▹▹▹ "Unsettling Exiles: Chinese Migrants in Hong Kong and the Southern Periphery During the Cold War" with Angelina Chin.

📅 May 12, 2023 (Friday)
⏲️ 13:00-14:30 Hong Kong time
🕹️ Online via Zoom
💬 English

The conventional story of Hong Kong celebrates the people who fled the mainland in the wake of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949. In this telling, thrived under British colonial rule, transforming Hong Kong into a cosmopolitan city and an industrial and financial hub. Unsettling Exiles recasts identity formation in Hong Kong, demonstrating that the complexities of crossing borders shaped the city’s uneasy place in the Sinophone world.

Angelina Y. Chin foregrounds the experiences of the many people who passed through Hong Kong without settling down or finding a sense of belonging, including refugees, deportees, “undesirable” residents, and members of sea communities. She emphasizes that flows of people did not stop at Hong Kong’s borders but also bled into neighboring territories such as Taiwan and Macau. Chin develops the concept of the “Southern Periphery”—the region along the southern frontier of the PRC, outside its administrative control yet closely tied to its political space. Both the PRC and governments in the Southern Periphery implemented strict migration and deportation policies in pursuit of border control, with profound consequences for people in transit. Chin argues that Hong Kong identity emerged from the collective trauma of exile and dislocation, as well as a sense of being on the margins of both the Communist and Nationalist Chinese regimes during the Cold War. Drawing on wide-ranging research, Unsettling Exiles sheds new light on Hong Kong’s ambivalent relationship to the mainland, its role in the global Cold War, and the origins of today’s political currents.

Angelina Chin is associate professor of history at Pomona College. She is the author of Bound to Emancipate: Working Women and Urban Citizenship in Early Twentieth-Century China and Hong Kong (2012).