Chenxi Tang

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.

Professor Tang’s research, scholarship, and teaching fall into four interlocking areas:

-       Geopolitics, international relations, and world order from the perspectives of literature and intellectual history. His forthcoming book (scheduled for completion in 2026), Two Worlds: The Idea of Europe vs. The Idea of China from the Beginning to the Nineteenth Century, explores 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 Present Age, is in preparation.

-       Political and legal humanities. Literary figurations and theoretical articulations of the political and the legal have been the principal objects of his inquiry. A key publication in this area is the book Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 (Cornell University Press, 2018).

-        European literature and thought. Besides relevant book publications – Imagining World Order, as well as The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2008) – he has published dozens of articles in edited volumes and leading journals in Europe and the US, including Deutsche Vierteljahresschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte (DVJS), Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft, Comparative Literature, New German Critique, and Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA). One focus of the article publications is German literature during the Classical-Romantic period and the Baroque, offering interpretations of authors such as Goethe, Gryphius, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schiller, and Fr. Schlegel.

-       In recent years, his research and teaching have broadened to include Chinese literature and thought. The initial findings in this area will be presented in his forthcoming book, Two Worlds: The Idea of Europe vs. The Idea of China from the Beginning to the Nineteenth Century.

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.