Professor Lily Cho is Associate Dean, Global & Community Engagement and an Associate Professor in the Department of English and at York University, where her research focuses on diasporic subjectivity within the fields of cultural studies, postcolonial literature and theory and Asian North American and Canadian literature. 

Recently, Lily Cho’s book Mass Capture: Chinese Head Tax and the Making of Non-Citizens was awarded Outstanding Achievement in the Multidisciplinary/Interdisciplinary category by the Association for Asian American Studies. 

Mass Capture focuses on an extraordinary collection of Chinese Canadian head tax certificates known as "CI 9s", the first mass use of identification photography in Canada used to track movements of thousands of Chinese migrants. Drawing from this archive, Lily’s research explores the relationship between citizenship, photography and anticipation as a mode of agency, while reclaiming the CI 9s as more than documents of racist repression. 

“Given that we are approaching the centenary anniversary of one of the most racist pieces of legislation in Canadian history, I hope that Mass Capture helps us to understand how the work of excluding people from access to citizenship is a process of surveillance and capture. At the same time, I hope that this book brings readers to the complex beauty of the images of the Chinese migrants caught in the identification photographs that are at the heart of this research project,” says Lily. 

Mass Capture is a SSHRC-funded project supported by the York Centre for Asian Research. 

Connect with Dr. Lily Cho to learn more about her work.