Researchers

This page is still under construction. More information will be available by the end of the Summer. For the moment, it only includes scholars who are part of The Exeter-Fudan Global Thought Network whose particular interests deal with the entanglement of political languages and philosophical traditions.

 

Tongdong Bai is the Dongfang chair professor of Philosophy at Fudan University in China, and a Global Professor of Law at NYU’s Law School. His research interests include Chinese philosophy and political philosophy. He has two books published in Chinese: A New Mission of an Old State: The Comparative and Contemporary Relevance of Classical Confucian Political Philosophy, and Tension of Reality: Einstein, Bohr and Pauli in the EPR Debates, both by Peking University Press in 2009. He also has two books published in English: China: The Political Philosophy of the Middle Kingdom (Zed Books, 2012), and Against Political Equality: The Confucian Case (Princeton University Press, 2019). He is also the director of an English-based MA and visiting program in Chinese philosophy at Fudan University that is intended to promote the studies of Chinese philosophy in the world. These and other academic and social activities in which he is involved are all aimed to introduce new political norms that draw their resources from traditional Chinese philosophy and are informed by comparative philosophy and political theories.

Ross Carroll is a Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and the University of Exeter. His research interests are in the history of early modern political thought, with a focus on eighteenth and nineteenth century Britain and France. His first book, Uncivil Mirth: Ridicule in Enlightenment Britain (Princeton 2021), recovers the Enlightenment debate on the appropriate use of ridicule as an instrument of moral and political reform. He has also published recently on Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on political economy, the history of contempt as a political and moral concept, and the hidden intellectual labour performed by the wives of great political thinkers such as Alexis de Tocqueville. At present Carroll is writing a short book on Edmund Burke and plans a future research project on the political thought of the French political theorist and abolitionist, Gustave de Beaumont.

Dario Castiglione is Director of the Centre for Political Thought at the University of Exeter. His research interests are both historical and theoretical. His historical interests are mainly concerned with the history of political and philosophical thought; with particular interest in the early modern republican and the jurisprudential traditions; the Scottish Enlightenment, and the debate about commerce and morality; the historiography of political thought and its methodological implications; philosophical scepticism. His more theoretical interests are concerned with democratic theory and the interconnection between state and society, in particular on ideas of representation, participation and accountability; on the concepts of trust, civil society, citizenship, and social capital; and on the public-private distinction. He has published extensively on both areas of research. Amongst his publications those that mostly deal with political languages and their entanglement include edited volumes on The History of Political Thought in National Context (CUP, 2001, also translated into Chinese); Shifting the Boundaries. Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century (EUP, 1995); and more recently Creating Political Presence: The New Politics of Representation (Chicago UP, 2018), and Les Défis de la Representation (Garnier Classiques, 2019). He has been visiting professor or fellow at various institutions in the USA, Australia, Germany, Italy, and more recently has been visiting fellows or visiting speaker in several Chinese Universities, including Fudan, Peking, SJTU, and Tsinghua.

Demin Duan is an associate professor with tenure at the Department of Political Science, School of Government, Peking University. He got his PhD from the Institute of Philosophy (Center for Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy) at the Catholic University of Leuven. He teaches and researches on political theories, history of political thought, European studies.

Regenia Gagnier is a Professor of English at the University of Exeter. Her specialisms include the geopolitics of language and literature migration; political economy and political languages; digital humanities; literary and social theory; sex, gender and sexuality; interdisciplinary studies, especially science and technology; and women in the professions. Since 2006 her research has focussed on the global circulation of Anglophone literatures and cultures and the geopolitics of language and literature migration. Her book on modernization and the global circulation of political languages, Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century (2018) is published in the Palgrave series New Comparisons in World Literature. Gagnier has served as Chair of the Consortium of Institutes of Advanced Study, Great Britain and Ireland; Presiding Officer of six MLA Division Executives in the USA and the AHRC Research Panel and University English Executive, UK. She is Honorary Centenary Fellow of the English Association; Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and Academia Europaea, and on the International Executive Committee of IAUPE (International Association of University Professors of English).  She was President of the British Association for Victorian Studies 2009-2012, and currently sits on the £1.5 Billion Selection and Interview Panels of UKRI Global Challenges Research Fund. In 2020, she was elected Fellow of the British Academy.

Iain Hampsher-Monk is a Professor of Political Theory at the University of Exeter, as well as the co-Founder and Joint Editor of the History of Political Thought journal. His research interests lie in early-modern political thought and discourse, in particular, in republican thought and its naturalisation in British political thinking, in seventeenth and eighteenth-century radicalism, the political thought of Edmund Burke and his contemporaries, and in methodological problems associated with the history and understanding of the political thought of the past. He also works and publishes on contemporary political thought, particularly in areas associated with democratic theory, toleration and theories of equality. Hampsher-Monk has published extensively in these areas, with his work translated into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese and Korean. He has acted as head of the Department of Politics at Exeter, as well as Director of Research in the department. In 2017 he was awarded an Emeritus Chair.

Christine Hauskeller is a Professor of Philosophy and Sociology and the Director of Global Engagement at the University of Exeter. She has a long-standing interest in the relationships between society and individuals: In studying processes of interdependence and co-constitution, how philosophy has conceptualized them and which institutions and practices, which power structures and knowledge formations shape cultures and horizons of living in the contemporary world. She has focused on Judith Butler and Michel Foucault’s understanding of the subject from a perspective of critical theory, with her postdoctoral research encompassing empirical studies on how moral values and cultural differences affect epistemic practices. Looking at questions of knowledge production, ethical and social values, bioeconomies and science policy, Hauskeller introduces a unique perspective from her theoretical grounding in critical theory and the use of empirical methods to study normative practices. She has been appointed as a member numerous of Ethics Commissions and Committees, as well as multiple research funding panels, most recently acting as Vice-Chair of the European Research Council ERC Synergy Panel (2019).

Hongtu Li is a professor of intellectual history in the Department of History at Fudan University and the Deputy Director of the Centre for Global Intellectual Research at East China Normal University. His research fields include modern European intellectual history and social history, especially nationalism, liberalism and socialism. He is currently working on a project on global intellectual history. His new book De la Liberté. John Stuart Mill et la naissance du libéralisme, was published by the Editions Kime, Paris 2021. He is also the author in Chinese of Vision of Ideas (2020), Context, Concept and Rhetoric: Thinking on Intellectual History (2016), An Intensive Reading of Mill’s On Liberty (2009), Liberalism in Modern Western Europe (2007), Nationalism in Modern Western Europe (1999). He is the chief editor of three series of translations of books on Modern European Intellectual History (for People’s Press, 2014), on the Study of Conceptual History, and on the “Cambridge School” (both the last two series for East China Normal University Press, 2010 and 2005), and the co-editor of The Study of Global Intellectual History, Vol. I (Social Science Academic Press, 2019) in Chinese, and Chine France – Europe Asie, Itinéraires de concepts (Rued’Ulm, 2018). He has been visiting scholar or visiting professor at many universities including the University of Cambridge, the University of Manchester, the University of Glasgow, the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, the Ecole Normale Superieure in Lyon, Cergy-Pontoise University in France, Foundation Maison des Sciences de L’homme in France.

Li Li is the Director of Research in the Graduate School of Education at the University of Exeter, the Director of Global Engagement for GSE and Assistant Associate Dean for the College of Social Sciences and International Studies. Her research interests include teacher cognition, ‘applied’ conversation analysis, social interaction, thinking skills, and technology-enhanced language learning. Li’s most recent project is a research monograph Language Teacher Cognition: A Sociocultural Perspective (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) which aims to expand the understanding of teacher cognition from a sociocultural perspective, highlighting the significance of ‘context’ and ‘social interaction’ in the development of one’s knowledge.

Catherine Owen is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Exeter, UK. Previously she was British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow also at Exeter. Her research interests include participatory governance in authoritarian contexts. Prior to her appointments at Exeter, Catherine lectured in the Department of History and Civilization at Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, China. Catherine has held Visiting Fellowships at the European University at St Petersburg, Fudan University Shanghai, the St Petersburg branch of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, and the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. Her most recent research has been published in The China QuarterlyReview of International Studies, and British Journal of Politics and International Relations. Learn more about Catherine’s work here.

Junfeng Ren is Professor of political theory at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University. He holds positions as the Fulbright Research Scholar, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2009-2010) and Senior Associate Member, St. Antony’s College, University of Oxford (2003-2004). His academic interests include democratic theory, political development, Western political history and political thoughts. His major publications include: Sectionalism and Nationalism: A Study of U.S. Political Development (2003), Beyond Right and Left: A Comparative Study of Nordic Party Politics (2011), Township and the Origin of American Politics (2011), Rise and Fall of Empire: The Political World of Thucydides (2017), The landmark of Thucydides: Between History and Politics (chief editor, 2021), On politics: From Herodotus to Karl Schmitt (forthcoming). The courses he has been teaching include: Political Theory of Democracy, Western Political Thoughts, Western Political History, American Constitutional Classics. He is also deeply involved in liberal education at Fudan University, the core courses he is teaching right now include “Tocqueville’s Democracy in America”, “Thucydides’ The Peloponnesian War”.

Sajjad Rizvi is an Associate Professor of Islamic Intellectual History and Islamic studies at the University of Exeter, as well as Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam. He is an intellectual historian who is interested in the course of philosophy in the Islamic world both past and present. Increasingly he is interested in how that study and category of philosophy coincides with the emergent category of global philosophy. In terms of method, his research is informed by the need for a decolonial and reparative study of Islam. Rizvi is currently interested in three projects: completing an intellectual history of philosophical traditions in Iran and North India in the 18th century, a diachronic study of the philosophy of time in Islamic thought, and the reception of some European philosophies in the postcolonial Muslim context. On this last project, he has embarked on a seed project with case studies of Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan supported by the European Network Fund. He has also advised various government departments and private sector concerns on Iraq, Iran, Shiʿi Islam in the Gulf, and Islam in Britain and Europe.

Xiangchen Sun is professor and the dean of the School of Philosophy, Fudan University. He got his BA, MA and Ph.D. degrees at Fudan. His fields of research include western modern philosophy, enlightenment philosophy, political philosophy, Jewish and Christian philosophy, phenomenology, French philosophy, and comparative philosophy. He has been a visiting scholar or an invited researcher in the Department of Philosophy of Peking University, Regent College in Canada, Yale University in the USA, the Institute of Chinese Christian Culture Research in Hong Kong, the University of Birmingham in the UK, the School of Philosophy in the University of Munich in Germany, the University of Chicago in the USA, National University of Taiwan. His main publications in Chinese include Metaphysics of Seventeen CenturyFacing the Other: On Levinas’ Philosophical thoughtPolitical philosophy and Sino-Theology.

Zhangmei Tang is a research fellow at the Philosophy Department of Sichuan University. She received her BA and MA from Lanzhou University and her PhD from the University of Exeter. Her research interests are focused on political philosophy, moral philosophy and political phenomenology (if there is any). Her area of expertise is Hannah Arendt’s political thought and its sources from the ‘Continental’ tradition, especially the German phenomenological tradition. Her working project is interrogating the possibility of a political phenomenology within and beyond Arendt, particularly in the face of today’s fast-developing technology. She also has a special interest in the history of the reception and adaptation of philosophical concepts within Chinese audiences that is varied from different time and space. Her personal website is Orchid: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6235-497X.

Nan Zhang is Associate Professor of English at Fudan University and an Honorary Associate Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong. She received her B.A. in International Finance from Fudan University and her Ph.D. in English Literature from Johns Hopkins University. She was a recipient of the 2020 Humanities Research Centre Fellowship at Australian National University and British Academy Seed Funding in 2019. She is Visiting Associate Professor in the School of English at HKU for the year 2021-22. She works on nineteenth- and early twentieth-century British literature and global modernism. Her research interests also include cosmopolitan studies, history of political thought, aesthetics and ethics, and economics. She has published a book in Chinese on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and is completing a book in English exploring modernist writers’ engagement with various forms of civic virtue in a global context. Her recent articles, which deal with both modernist writers such as E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce, and political philosophical figures like Edmund Burke, David Hume, and John Maynard Keynes, have appeared in English journals including Modernist Cultures, The Journal of Modern Literature, and Journal of East-West Thought, as well as Chinese ones. She is also the Chinese translator of two David Lodge novels and some recent articles by intellectual historians including Richard Bourke and Jürgen Osterhammel.

Yue Zhuang is a Senior Lecturer in Chinese, Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter. Her main research interest is in the landscape art history of China and Britain in the early modern period, within the broad cultural context of philosophy, rituals, health and wellbeing, and social practices.  Yue is particularly interested in Chinese-European contacts in relation to landscape imagination in the early modern and how such contacts engaged the changing ideas in the discourses of philosophy, religion, economy and politics that constitute the process of modernity. From 2011–2013, she was a principal investigator for Matteo Ripa’s “Views of Jehol”, an Intra-European Fellowship funded by EU Marie Curie Actions. Through an international symposium held in the Rietberg Museum in Zurich in 2013 and a volume of collected essays Entangled Landscapes co-edited by Yue, the project concludes with ‘entangled landscapes’ as a new paradigm for research innovation. From 2014–2018, Yue further developed this new paradigm in her second project ‘Nature Entangled,’ also funded by EU Marie Curie Actions. A sub-theme of this project, with a focus on Sir William Temple and his reception of China, was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship (2016–2017). A recent publication ‘Gardens of happiness: Sir William Temple, temperance and China’ for this project may be viewed here.

 

Postgraduate Members

Astrid Jenkins is a former BA International Relations student at the University of Exeter, now completing an MPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford. Her research interests include the role of history in shaping contemporary political posture, with specific reference to the role of China’s century of humiliation in the nation’s present foreign policy and national discourse. Having studied philosophy and political theory at both the University of Exeter and the University of Hong Kong, she is interested in the intersection of political languages across different cultures, and the way in which a divergence in European and Chinese political thought impacts contemporary politics.

 

Sarah Khan completed her MA in Political Thought from the University of Exeter in 2022. At present, she is associated with the Centre as a research intern.

 

Bingshu Zhao is a PhD candidate in the Department of Politics at the University of Exeter. She received her MA in Political Theory at Tongji University and BA in Political Science and Public Administration at China Youth University of Political Studies. Her research interests lie in the history of political thought, modern state theory and comparative political theory. She is currently working on the idea of family and its relation to the state in early modern political philosophy and a comparison of the family-state relationship in European and Chinese traditional political languages.