Louisa Lim

Associate Professor Louisa Lim holds the position of Associate Professor of Audio-Visual Journalism in the School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, at the University of Melbourne, where she also serves as Deputy Director of the Centre for Advancing Journalism. She earned her PhD in Journalism Studies from Monash University, with a thesis titled 'In Search of the King of Kowloon: Hong Kong’s Identity Crisis and the Media Creation of an Icon'. Prior to her academic career, Lim was a foreign correspondent reporting from China for a decade, serving as Beijing bureau chief for NPR from 2007 to 2012 and for the BBC from 2003 to 2007. She teaches audio journalism and podcasting, contributing to journalism pedagogy research, including studies on journalistic cultures in student cohorts.

Lim's research focuses on China's global media influence strategies, Hong Kong identity and trauma, and Tiananmen Square events. Her key publications include the books The People's Republic of Amnesia: Tiananmen Revisited (Oxford University Press, 2014), shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing and the Helen Bernstein Prize for Excellence in Journalism, and Indelible City: Dispossession and Defiance in Hong Kong (Penguin/Riverhead, 2022), which was shortlisted for the Stella Prize, Walkley Book Award, Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and Queensland Literary Award for Non-Fiction, and received the Overseas Press Club of America Cornelius Ryan Award. She co-authored reports such as Weaponising the Free Press? China’s Global Media Offensive (2019), The China Story: Reshaping the World’s Media (2020), and The Covid-19 Story: Unmasking China’s Strategy (2021), and contributed to The world according to China: Capturing and analysing the global media influence strategies of a superpower (Pacific Journalism Review, 2023) and the chapter Hong Kong as Pillar of Shame: Trauma Foretold, Suppressed and Compounded in the Routledge Handbook of Trauma in East Asia (2023). Lim received the 2021 JERAA Award for Outstanding Teaching in a Journalism Program. She co-hosts the award-winning Little Red Podcast, which won the Australian Podcast Award for news and current affairs, and serves as podcast critic for The Saturday Paper, with journalism appearing in The New York Times and The Guardian. Her work has been cited over 790 times according to Google Scholar.

Professional Email: louisa.lim@unimelb.edu.au