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Vivien Ng

Vivien Wai-ying Ng^[1] is an American historian and filmmaker. Born to a Chinese-American family, she obtained her PhD at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa and was a professor at the University of Oklahoma before moving to the University at Albany, SUNY, where she is associate professor emerita at the Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies.^[2] A scholar of social history in China and later Asian-American studies, she was the president of the National Women's Studies Association from 1993 until 1994 and has served as the chair of SUNY Albany's Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies and women's studies program. Outside of academia, she also works on documentaries and short stories.

Biography[edit]

Vivien Ng was born into a Chinese-American family, with her great-grandfather running a restaurant in Springfield, Massachusetts, her paternal grandfather running a grocery store in Chinatown, Manhattan, and her maternal grandfather being a Columbia University-educated filmmaker and businessman.^[3][2][4] She studied at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (UH), where she was awarded the 1976 Lee Shao-sheng Award for Excellence in Chinese Studies.^[5] Later, she obtained her PhD at UH;^[2] her 1980 dissertation, Homicide and Insanity in Qing China, was supervised by Brian E. McKnight.^[1]

After teaching at UH starting in 1981, she moved to the University of Oklahoma in 1982,^[5] where she was assistant professor of history and women's studies by 1987.^[6] She was a 1989 Southwestern Bell Humanities Fellow.^[5] She was one of the two 1990-1991 Rockefeller Residency Fellows at Hunter College, with her project being a study on the impact of the end of the First Sino-Japanese War on Chinese women "The New Woman: Gender Reconstruction in Modern China, 1895-1911".^[7][8]

She was present at the American Association of University Women (AAUW)'s 1986 Southwest Central Regional conference,^[9] became president of the AAUW's Oklahoma division in May 1987,^[6] and was part of the AAUW Educational Foundation's board from 1989 until 1993.^[2] She was the president of the National Women's Studies Association from 1993 until 1994.^[10]

In 1995, she moved to the University at Albany, SUNY,^[5] where she became director of their women's studies program by 1998.^[5] She was also chair of their Department of Women's, Gender & Sexuality Studies from 1995 until 2000 and from 2011 until 2017.^[2]

Ng initially started with social history in China, with articles on LGBT rights and rape law.^[2] In 1990, she published Madness in Late Imperial China: From Illness to Deviance, a book on the treatment of the criminally insane during Qing dynasty China which is "still being used in comparative law courses in several law schools."^[2] As of 1998, she was reportedly undergoing work on another book, Essential Woman: Construction of Womanhood in Early 20th-Century.^[5] Later, she shifted to Asian-American studies in the 1990s.^[2]

Ng has also worked in documentaries, including as a researcher and producer for the Maryknoll Sisters-focused Trailblazers in Habits.^[2] Work on two more documentaries, each focusing on Barbara Zuber and her maternal grandfather, is currently underway, as well as on a biography on Elizabeth Hirschboeck.^[2] She has also published short stories in 13th Moon and the anthology "Telling Moments: Autobiographical Lesbian Short Stories".^[2][11]

She lived in Norman, Oklahoma, as of 1986.^[9]

Filmography[edit]

Publications[edit]

• Madness in Late Imperial China: From Illness to Deviance (1990)^[12][13][14]

References[edit]