Graduate Associate
pdeklerk[at]yorku.ca
Master's Student
Graduate Program in Humanities, York University
Research Keywords:
Cultural memory; heritage; history; literature; cultural institutions; cultural studies; material culture; religion and spirituality; sociology; modernization
Research Region(s):
China
Research Diaspora(s):
Chinese Diaspora
Peter Vince de Klerk (戴璧文) is an MA student in Humanities at York University and a Graduate Associate of the York Centre for Asian Research. His research interests include Chinese cultural memory, heritage, diaspora, history, literature, religion and material culture.
His current MA research, provisionally titled Those Old Ones · 故人旧物: Ancestors, Inheritances, and the Cultural Memory of China in the Chinese Diaspora, explores relationships between cultural institutions in Chinese diaspora communities in the Greater Toronto Area. He is particularly interested in how these institutions interact to preserve and transmit cultural memory, sustain connections with China, and shape understandings of heritage, identity and belonging. This work also considers the roles of inherited objects, family narratives and ancestral traditions within these institutional relationships.
His broader research interests concern the remembrance and representation of “Old China” in contemporary China and within the diaspora. He is interested in examining how cultural heritage is preserved, reconstructed, transformed or forgotten amid modernization, and how people negotiate their relationships with inherited traditions in changing social and political contexts.