Nicole Vaughan

Nicole Vaughan is a PhD candidate in the Department of History interested in the intersections of space and the senses. Trained initially as an art historian, she holds an undergraduate degree from the University of Edinburgh, an MLitt in Transnational, Global and Spatial History from the University of St Andrews, and an MPhil in History from HKU.

Her dissertation project is a comparative urban history of nineteenth-century Hong Kong and San Francisco examining how ideas about race, gender, and class were produced in local spaces, represented in print culture, and reified as these texts circulated and passed into new contexts.

RESEARCH

Research Interests

• Long nineteenth-century
• The senses
• Soundscape
• Hong Kong
• Port cities
• Sailors
• Imperialism
• Travel writing
• Nuisance

PUBLICATIONS

Articles

L. Nicole Vaughan, “Civilizing the Colonial Soundscape: Space and the Regulation of Chinese Street Noise in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Urban History (2025): 1–19 (first view), https://doi.org/10.1017/S0963926825100473.

L. Nicole Vaughan, “Happy Valley Heterotopia: Representing Colonial Order in a Hong Kong ‘Other Space,’” Social Transformations in Chinese Societies 19, no. 1 (2022): 29–40, https://doi.org/10.1108/STICS-10-2021-0009.

Selected Conference Papers

“‘Intolerable Nuisance’ — Race, Class, and the Zoning of Noisy Trades in Hong Kong, 1900–1910,” New Histories of the Chinese Overseas Workshop, National University of Singapore, 19–20 June 2025.

“Race, Space, and the Regulation of Noise Nuisance in Colonial Hong Kong, from Hawker Cries to Noisy Trades (1865–1910),” AAS-in-Asia, Association for Asian Studies, Kathmandu, Nepal, 1–4 June 2025.

“European Loafers and the Nuisance of White Vagrancy in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” 13th Spring History Symposium, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, 3–4 May 2024

“Seeing Nuisance: Regulating the Visibility of Vice in Nineteenth-Century Hong Kong,” Society for Global Nineteenth-Century Studies World Congress, Singapore, 19–22 June 2023

“Nuisance and Civilisation: Regulating ‘Chinese Noise’ in Nineteenth Century Hong Kong,” Pacific Coast Conference on British Studies, Riverside, California, 24-26 March 2023