Ryan Cheuk Him Sun

PhD Student, Department of History
rchsun29@student.ubc.ca


Ryan Sun is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at UBC working with Prof. Leo Shin and Prof. Richard Menkis. My transnational project expands the geography of Jewish exile outside Europe and beyond Shanghai, and onto the British colonies of Hong Kong and Singapore. I adopt a refugee-centered approach that highlights the agency and mobilities of Austrian and German-Jewish refugees in formulating their escape plans, while slowly becoming entangled with the wartime policies of British colonial administrations, and their eventual internment and expulsions from both colonies. I consider how the distinct experiences of Jewish refugees in Hong Kong and Singapore have been ignored or subsumed within more standard narratives. I am particularly interested in Jewish refugees’ ship-bound experiences, especially how transiting colonial port-cities and encountering local inhabitants informed their understanding of ‘the Orient’, as well as how these ship-moments disrupt the standard narratives of the Holocaust and survivor testimonies.