Dr Mei-fen Kuo is a Research Fellow at Asia-Pacific Center for Social Investment and Philanthropy in Swinburne University of Technology. Prior to this she was an Australian Post-doctoral Fellow in the School of Social Science at La Trobe University as a part of a Linkage grant entitled ‘Unlocking Australia’s Chinese Archives: the political and social experience of the Chinese Australian community, 1909 to 1939’. She brings her polished bilingual research skills to make a significant contribution to research on Australian history through her pioneering study of Chinese Australians from a diasporic perspective. Her research adds much depth to knowledge of the Chinese-Australian urban elite in a transnational setting. It has helped promote scholarship on Chinese Australian history by forging a dialogue between international and diasporic Chinese studies.