Community Engagement & Partnerships Librarian
allan.cho@ubc.ca
Allan Cho is a librarian, writer, editor, and cultural organizer based in Vancouver, Canada. He completed both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in History at the University of British Columbia, where his master’s thesis, The Hong Kong Wuxia Movie: Identity and Politics, 1966–1976, examined the relationship between martial arts cinema, popular culture, and identity formation in postwar Hong Kong. During his time as a graduate student, Allan was Editor-in-Chief of Perspectives Newspaper, the first Chinese-English bilingual student newspaper in Canada. A founding member of the Vancouver Hong Kong Forum Society, Allan’s professional interests involve Asian Canadian history, digital humanities, migration archives, and public memory, and he continues to advocate for libraries as spaces for cultural dialogue and diasporic connection.
Allan and Winnie L. Cheung directed the research project, The Early Hong Kong–Canada Connections, funded by the Hong Kong Museum of History, which developed a comprehensive picture of Chinese migration to Canada from the pre-Gold Rush era of the 1850s to the post–Second World War period of the 1960s.
As Executive Director of the Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop, Executive Editor of Ricepaper Magazine, and Festival Director of the LiterASIAN Festival, Allan has supported conversations around migration, displacement, intergenerational memory, and Asian diasporic cultural production across Canada and beyond. At UBC Library, Cho’s work emphasizes community engagement, cultural preservation, and EDI- and trauma-informed practices, and is the creator of the UBC Library’s Research Guide for Hong Kong Studies.