He received his doctorate in Comparative Literature from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and was Joukowsky postdoctoral fellow at Brown University. Returning to post-handover Hong Kong in 1998, he first joined the Humanities Division at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Crossing over from comparative literature to cultural studies via the interfacing of postmodern and postcolonial criticism, he has published on Hong Kong popular culture and film, Chinese drama and comparative literary studies.