John Nguyet Erni is a teacher, writer, and advocate. He is Fung Hon Chu Endowed Professor in Humanics, Chair Professor in Humanities, and Head of the Department of Humanities & Creative Writing (2014-2020) at Hong Kong Baptist University.

Previously, he taught at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Wisconsin in the U.S., as well as City University of Hong Kong and Lingnan University in Hong Kong.  A former recipient of the Rockefeller Humanities Research Fellowship, he worked at Columbia University’s School of Public Health in the Program on Gender, Sexuality, Health, and Human Rights.  He was also Visiting Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication (2008); Inaugural Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies of the University of Lincoln (2018 and 2019); and William Lim Siu Wai Visiting Professorial Fellow in Cultural Studies in Asia at National University of Singapore (2018).  In 2001 – 2005, he was elected to the Executive Board of the International Communication Association (ICA; based in Washington DC, USA). In 2015, he became a Founding Member of the Global University for Sustainability and in 2013 – 2016, he was appointed Country Director for Hong Kong in Asian Congress for Media and Communication (based in the Philippines).

In 2014, he was elected Fellow of the Hong Kong Academy of the Humanities.  In 2017, he was elected as the Academy’s President.  In 2018, he was elected Board Member-at-large for ICA, for which he began his term in May 2019. Also in 2019, Erni received the prestigious President’s Award for Outstanding Performance in Research Supervision from HKBU. In 2020, he embarked on a new research project funded by the Humanities and Social Sciences Prestigious Fellowship Scheme of the Hong Kong government’s Research Grants Council.

Erni has published widely on international and Asia-based cultural studies, human rights legal criticism, Chinese consumption of transnational culture, gender and sexuality in media culture, youth popular consumption in Hong Kong and Asia, cultural politics of race/ethnicity/migration, and critical public health.  He is the author or editor of 9 academic titles, including Law and Cultural Studies: A Critical Rearticulation of Human Rights (Routledge, 2019); Visuality, Emotions, and Minority Culture: Feeling Ethnic (Springer, 2017); (In)visible Colors: Images of Non-Chinese in Hong Kong Cinema – A Filmography, 1970s – 2010s (with Louis Ho, Cinezin Press, 2016); Understanding South Asian Minorities in Hong Kong (with Lisa Leung, HKUP, 2014); Cultural Studies of Rights: Critical Articulations (Routledge, 2011); Internationalizing Cultural Studies: An Anthology (with Ackbar Abbas, Blackwell, 2005); Asian Media Studies: The Politics of Subjectivities (with Siew Keng Chua, Blackwell, 2005); and Unstable Frontiers: Technomedicine and the Cultural Politics of “Curing” AIDS (Minnesota, 1994).

Raised in Hong Kong as a minority (Filipino-Vietnamese-Chinese), fluent in Chinese, and having studied and taught in the U.S., Erni brings to his work a unique fusion of Western theories in cultural studies, ethnic minority sensibility, local cultural experience in the postcolonial Chinese context, and professional consultative experiences.