Guest speakers

Prof. Jon Thares Davidann (Fulbright Specialist)

Jon Davidann (Hawaii Pacific University) is a leading American scholar in the field of U.S.-East Asian Relations and World History, with interests ranging from cross-cultural to political and intellectual history. Davidann is currently writing a monograph on the rise of American and East Asian concepts of modernity in the twentieth century entitled The Limits of Westernization: East Asian and American Intellectuals Create Hybrid Modernity.​ He is the co-author, together with Marc Jason Gilbert, of Cross-Cultural Encounters in Modern World History (Routledge 2012). He has published numerous books and articles, among which Cultural Diplomacy in U.S.-Japanese Relations, 1919-1941 (Palgrave 2007) is his most recent monograph.

Prof. Bart Dessein

Bart Dessein is the Secretary-General of the European Association for Chinese Philosophy and the President of the European Association for Chinese Studies. He also is the president of the research group ‘East Asian Culture in Perspective: Identity, Historical Consciousness, Modernity’ of Ghent University, Belgium. Besides having written extensively on the history of Buddhism, Dessein is the author of numerous works on comparative and cross-cultural philosophy and ethics, some of which appeared in journals such as Philosophy East and West​, Global Intellectual History, Reproductive Biomedicine Online and Shanghai Daxue Xuebao.

Prof. Okada Atsushi

Okada Atsushi is a leading Japanese scholar in aesthetics, history of the Western arts and Renaissance and Italian Studies. He is the recipient of many prizes, among which the Yoshida Hidekazu Prize and the prestigious Yomiuri Prize for Literature. He is professor at Kyoto University, Faculty of Integrated Human Studies, Department of Human Coexistence. Okada is the author of more than twenty monographs among which Mō hitotsu no Runesansu (Another Renaissance, 1994), Furoito no Itaria (Freud’s Italy 2008), and Hantomei no bigaku (Aesthetics of the diaphanous, 2010).

Prof. Wang Hui

Wang Hui is one of the foremost public intellectuals in today’s China. He is Changjiang Scholar Professor in Tsinghua University and the Director of the Tsinghua Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Former editor of the influential magazine Dushu, Wang is the author of many seminal works, among which The Rise of Modern Chinese Thought (four volumes), The Depolitized Politics, “Tibetan Question” between East and West, From Asian Perspective: Narrations of Chinese History, The Short Twentieth Century: Chinese Revolution and the Logic of Politics, etc. Many of his works have been translated into different languages including China’s New Order, The End of the Revolution, The Politics of Imagining Asia and China from Empire to Nation-State, China’s Twentieth Century, etc. He is the winner of the 2013 Luca Pacioli Prize.