Dr Mei-fen Kuo left her native Taiwan in 2003 to undertake a PhD thesis in Australia. In 2008, she was awarded a PhD degree by La Trobe University, and in 2009 she won an internationally competitive Australian Endeavour Award. From late 2010 to September 2013 she was an Australian Post-doctoral Fellow in the School of Social Science at La Trobe University. There she worked with Professor Judith Brett and Dr James Leibold on ‘Unlocking Australia’s Chinese Archives: The Political and Social Experience of the Chinese Australian Community, 1909 to 1939’, a three-year Linkage grant project supported by the Australian Research Council. She is currently a Research Fellow in the Asia-Pacific Centre for Social Investment and Philanthropy at Swinburne University of Technology, where she is working on an ARC-funded project with Professor John Fitzgerald, entitled ‘Asia-Pacific Philanthropies: Transnational Networks, Anti-colonial Nationalism, and the Emergence of Modern Chinese Philanthropy, 1850–1949’.
In Making Chinese Australia, Mei-fen has made a significant contribution to research on Australian history through her pioneering study of Chinese Australians from a diasporic perspective; her bilingual research skills have allowed her to make full use of detailed but rarely consulted primary sources that are only available in Chinese. Her research adds much depth to knowledge of the Chinese-Australian urban elite in a transnational setting, and forges a dialogue between international and diasporic Chinese studies. Professor Adam McKeown wrote of her work: “I can only think of two or three other social histories of Chinese anywhere in the world that have captured this period with an equal appreciation of the social fluidity, rapid changes and shifting discourse”.
