I work in the fields of premodern Chinese philosophy and intellectual history (Warring States to 12th century), working primarily on the philosophy of emotions, cognition and subjectivity. I am particularly interested in how our ways of understanding the self and the human being are intertwined with our ideas about the workings of the natural world. I am also interested in how this nexus of convergences shapes our values and our conceptions of the moral life.
These are some of the themes I deal with in my new book, The Emotions in Early Chinese Philosophy, which was released in February 2017 with Oxford University Press.
For winter terms 2017 and 2018, with a grant from the CEU Humanities Initiative to conducted research and taught courses in Chinese philosophy and intellectual culture in the departments of Philosophy and Medieval Studies. Under the auspices of this project I also ran a lecture series called “The Human and the Sciences of Nature: Chinese and Comparative Perspectives.” This series was supported by a European Region Lecture Series Grant from the Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation in Taiwan.
From fall 2017 I have been a Senior Research Fellow and Co-Project Director (with Professor Niels Gaul, University of Edinburgh, as Principal Investigator) of a cross-cultural China-Byzantium research project funded by a European Research Council Consolidator Grant (2017-2022), called “Classicising Learning in Medieval Imperial Systems: Cross-cultural Approaches to Byzantine Paideia and Tang/Song Xue.”