Tse Tommy

Dr. Tommy Tse is an Assistant Professor in the Television and Cross-Media Culture (TVCMC) program at the Media Studies Department, University of Amsterdam. He is also affiliated with the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), the HKU Global China Social Research Hub, and the Department of Cultural Studies, Lingnan University as an Honorary Associate Professor (2022 – 2025). He specialises in East Asia’s media and cultural industries, creative labour, consumer culture and sociology of fashion. In 2022, Tse received the prestigious European Research Council's Consolidator Grant (ERC CoG) (2 million Euros) for his 5-year multi-sited ethnographic project entitled "China Fashion Power - Fashioning Power through South-South Interaction: Re-thinking Creativity, Authenticity, Cultural Mediation and Consumer Agency along China-Africa Fashion Value Chains".

Tse completed his Bachelor of Arts (hon) degree in Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong, followed by his MPhil study in Gender, Literature and Film in the same department. After graduation, Tse first worked in various media and creative companies, including Art Map Ltd., ADO and TBWA\ (4As ad agency), and then decided to pursue a PhD degree at the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong, conducting ethnographic research on the intricate production and mediation of fashion as a symbolic and cultural product in and through various institutions in Hong Kong and across Asia.

Before joining UvA, Tse taught at six different institutions: the Department of Sociology, The University of Hong Kong; Faculty of Social Science, Chinese University of Hong Kong; School of Communication, Hong Kong Baptist University; Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London; the Culture and Media Domain, HKU SPACE CC; and Hong Kong Design Institute. Over the years, Tse also worked as a project-based copywriter for various global fashion, luxury and pharmaceutical brands.

In 2015, Tse was the Visiting Scholar at the National Center for Radio and Television Studies, Communication University of China, Beijing, and at the Fashion Institute of Design, Donghua University, Shanghai. Among hundreds of applicants around the world, Tse was shortlisted as one of the 30 "Dreamers" participating in the Alibaba Global Dreamers Programme in Hangzhou, China in Summer 2018. In Fall 2018, he was a Visiting Scholar/Research Associate at University College London (Anthropology Department) and London College of Fashion (Social and Cultural Studies). He is an elected member of the Amsterdam Young Academy (2020 - 2022), and he also serves the Editorial Board of Fashion, Style and Popular Culture (2021 – 2023), International Journal of Fashion Studies (2021 – 2023) and Work, Employment and Society (2021 – 2024). His work has appeared in Information, Communication and Society (Taylor & Francis), International Journal of Fashion Studies (Intellect), Journal of Consumer Culture (Sage), Journal of Cultural Economy (Taylor & Francis), Sociology (Sage) and Work, Employment and Society (Sage), in addition to his co-authored book Celebrity Culture and the Entertainment Industry in Asia: Use of Celebrity and Its Influence on Society, Culture and Communication (Intellect Books).