As questions of identity become more complex and more fraught in the contemporary arena, it is vital that we work to understand the historical pathways that have shaped ideas and arguments around modern identity. In this talk, I seek to uncover some of the principal factors influencing the course of identity politics over the past century or so. I focus in particular on the ways in which scientific ideas entered political debate.

Philippa Levine is Walter Prescott Webb Chair in History and Ideas Emerita at the University of Texas at Austin (USA) and Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University of London.  She has written on the history of feminism, of socially transmissible diseases, prostitution, reproduction and eugenics as well as the British Empire. She is currently completing a book on nakedness.

Dr Elizabeth LaCouture is a historian of gender, intersectionality and everyday life in modern China, Hong Kong, and East Asia and the founding director of the Gender Studies Program at the University of Hong Kong. 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.