Prof. Marco Wan 溫文灝教授
Professor
Director, Law and Literary Studies Programme
PhD., University of Cambridge
LLM, Harvard Law School
MA/BA Law (Hons)., University of Cambridge
BA., Yale University
Member, New York State Bar
CEDR and HKMAAL Mediator
Biography
Marco Wan is Professor of Law and Director of the Programme in Law and Literary Studies at the University of Hong Kong. He writes and teaches in law and humanities; constitutional law; law, gender, and sexuality; and legal theory. His research has been awarded the biennial Penny Pether Prize from the Association of Law, Literature and Humanities of Australasia, as well as the HKU Research Output Prize. He has also been a recipient of the HKU Outstanding Teaching Award.
His work focuses on the complex intersections between law and other areas of the humanities, and he is currently writing a monograph that explores how literary and cultural theory might shed light on the legal regulation of sexuality. His latest book, Film and Constitutional Controversy (Cambridge University Press, 2021) examines how constitutional debates are refracted in Hong Kong cinema. His first book, Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge, 2017), investigates how fiction interrogated legal and political constructions of gender in nineteenth-century England and France. All three projects are supported by three-year grants from the General Research Fund (GRF) of the University Grants Committee.
He is Managing Editor of Law & Literature, which was founded as the journal of the Law and Literature movement. He serves on the editorial boards of the Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities and the Edinburgh Studies in Law, Justice and the Visual (both from Edinburgh University Press); Hong Kong University Press; Law and Visual Jurisprudence (Springer); and the International Studies in Law and Literature (Brill).
He has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge, the Käte Hamburger ‘Law as Culture’ Center for Advanced Study in the Humanities in Germany, the National University of Singapore, and Yale Law School.
He is a frequent commentator on issues of equality, diversity, and inclusivity. He has also served as a curator for the Hong Kong Lesbian and Gay Film Festival.
He received his PhD and his first law degree from the University of Cambridge, where he was an Evan-Lewis Thomas Law Scholar and a Sir Edward Youde Memorial Fellow. He also holds an LLM from Harvard Law School. He received his BA in Comparative Literature from Yale University, where he was awarded the Fox International Fellowship.

Research Area
- Legal Regulation of Gender and Sexuality
- Law and Literature
- Law and Film

Research Area
- Legal Regulation of Gender and Sexuality
- Law and Literature
- Law and Film
Representative Publications
Editorships and External Positions
Monographs
Film and Constitutional Controversy: Visualizing Hong Kong Identity in the Age of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Masculinity and the Trials of Modern Fiction (Routledge: 2017)
- Penny Pether Prize, Law, Literature, and Humanities Association of Australasia
- University Research Output Prize, HKU
Edited Volumes
Law and New Media: West of Everything (with Peter Goodrich and Christian Delage) (Edinburgh University Press, 2019)
Law and the Humanities in China, 31(2) Law & Literature (2019)
Legal Marginalia (with Daniel Matthews), 11(1) Law and Humanities (2017)
The Rule of Law and the Cultural Imaginary in (Post-)colonial East Asia (with Janny Leung), 18 Law/Text/Culture (2014)
Reading the Legal Case: Cross Currents between Law and the Humanities (Routledge, 2012)
Representative Journal Articles and Book Chapters
‘Film and the Reimagination of Kinship: Graham Kolbeins’s Queer Japan’ in The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies, ed. Karen Crawley, Thomas Giddens, and Timothy D. Peters (2024), pp.413-422
‘Law, Film, and Trans Identity in Hong Kong’, 21(2) International Journal of Constitutional Law (2023), 673-689
‘Queer Temporalities and Transgender Rights: A Hong Kong Case Study’, 30(4) Social & Legal Studies (2021), 563-580
‘The Invention of Tradition: Same-sex Marriage and its Discontents in Hong Kong’, 18(2) International Journal of Constitutional Law (2020), 539-562
‘A Ghost Story: Electoral Reform and Hong Kong Popular Theatre’, in Economies of Interpretation: Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law, ed. by Peter Goodrich and Michel Rosenfeld (Fordham University Press, 2019), pp.272-290
‘Cases as Cultural Events: the Hossack Murder Trial, Privacy and Susan Glaspell’s “A Jury of Her Peers”’, in Law and Literature, ed. by Kieran Dolin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp.308-322
‘Feminist Literary Theory and the Law: Reading Cases with Naomi Schor,’ 26(2) Feminist Legal Studies (2018), 163-183
‘The Artwork of Hong Kong’s Occupy Central’, in Civil Unrest, Law and Order in Hong Kong, ed. by Michael Ng and John Wong (Routledge, 2016)
‘Stare Decisis, Binding Precedent, and Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds’, in The Legal Case: Cross Currents between Law and the Humanities (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), pp. 205-217
‘A Matter of Style: On Reading the Oscar Wilde Trials as Literature’, 31(4) Oxford Journal of Legal Studies (2011), 709-726
Managing Editor, Law & Literature
Editorial Board Member, Asia-Pacific Journal on Human Rights and the Law
Editorial Board Member, Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities, Edinburgh University Press
Editorial Board Member, Edinburgh Studies in Law, Justice and the Visual, Edinburgh University Press
Editorial Board Member, Hong Kong University Press
Editorial Board Member, International Studies in Law and Literature, Brill
Editorial Board Member, Law and Visual Jurisprudence, Springer
Articles Editor, Hong Kong Law Journal