Ian Morley is Professor of Urban History in the Department of History at CUHK. He has published widely on the design of built environments, participated in TV documentaries for The Discovery Channel, Voom! and National Geographic, as well as been interviewed by The Wall Street Journal Asia, The Los Angeles Times, Southeast Asia Globe, La Stampa, and the US’ National Public Radio. In addition, he has contributed to media outlets such as Hong Kong News, South China Morning Post, Al Jazeera, The Diplomat, Philippine Inquirer, Daily Tribune, The Manila Times, and Agence France Presse, as well as academic outlets such as the American Historical Association magazine, Perspectives on History, and the Institute of International Asian Studies Newsletter. In 2020, his book American Colonisation and the City Beautiful was awarded the IPHS-Bosma Prize in Planning History Innovation. In 2024, he was awarded the CUHK Faculty of Arts’ Research Excellence Award and, in the same year, he co-convened the 20th Biennial Conference of the International Planning History Society (IPHS) in Hong Kong.
He currently is an editorial board member of the Brill book series Studies in Architecture and Urban History, an editorial board member of Planning Perspectives and World History Bulletin, as well as a council member of the Epidemic Urbanism Initiative. He is Vice President of the IPHS, and the Planning Perspectives’ Book Review Editor for the Asia Region.
He has been a Visiting Fellow at the University of Sydney (Australia), University College Dublin (Ireland), the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil), and Free University Berlin (Germany). In 2018 he was awarded the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative Global Connections Fellowship, and in 2020 he was awarded a Senior Fellowship by Advance HE (U.K.). He is also a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Royal Society of Arts, plus a chartered member of the Royal Town Planning Institute. In 2025 he was a visiting scholar in the Faculty of History at the University of Oxford (U.K.).
He is the eight-time recipient of the Faculty of Arts Outstanding Teaching Award. He was three times a successful applicant to CUHK’s International Partnership Development Programme, and he has been awarded five General Research Fund grants from Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council, eleven CUHK courseware and teaching development grants, and one Hong Kong Government Education Bureau-funded teaching grant. In late-2015/early-2016 he curated an exhibition at the CUHK University Library on ‘The History of the Philippines in Flags and Maps’, and in 2017 he was convenor of the conference Southeast Asia in Evolution: Trans-Pacific Agency and the City, c. 1850-1941. He is currently assisting in the rebuilding the Daniel H. Burnham Memorial in Manila, the Philippines, and he was a consultant to the Watts Gallery (U.K.) for their G.F. Watts Physical Energy sculpture project. From 2020-2 he was the CUHK Faculty of Arts e-Learning Liaison Officer.
