Professor Tang studied comparative literature, German literature, and philosophy at Fudan University (Shanghai), Peking University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich, and Columbia University (PhD 2000). He taught at the University of Chicago before joining the Berkeley faculty in 2007. He is a recipient of many awards, including Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, UC President’s Faculty Research Fellowship, and Research Fellowship of Hamburg Institute for Advanced Studies.
In his current research, Professor Tang is interested in questions of geopolitics, international relations, and world order, but approaches them as a scholar of literature and intellectual history. In studying literature and intellectual history, he values macro-historical perspectives and large geographical scales. His new book (to be completed in 2026), Two Worlds: The Idea of Europe versus the Idea of China from the Beginning to the Nineteenth Century, recounts the synchronous articulation of the respective collective identity and cohesion of Europe and the Sinosphere in three formative periods: the second half of the first millennium BCE, the centuries between 1000 and 1300, and the long eighteenth century. Another book, Two Planetary Orders: The Idea of the West versus the Idea of China in the 20th and 21st Centuries, is in preparation.
In the early phase of his research career, Tang was interested in the roles played by German literature and thought in the self-understanding and self-positioning of Europe in the world. His dissertation, Writing World History: The Emergence of Modern Global Consciousness in the Late Eighteenth Century (Columbia University 2000), and monograph, The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature and Philosophy in German Romanticism (Stanford UP 2008), study the ways in which Europe created a temporal-spatial framework for itself in the classical-romantic period of German literature and philosophy.
His book, Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Cornell UP 2018), expands the scale of analysis from German to European, examining the imaginative work performed by literature in establishing an international world order in early modern Europe.
Currently, Professor Tang serves as the chair of the Department of German, and the faculty director of the Interdisciplinary Studies Field in the Undergraduate Division of the College of Letters and Science.
