Chenxi Tang began his teaching career as an assistant professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. In 2007, he joined the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He studied philosophy, comparative literature, and German literature at Fudan University in Shanghai (BA), Peking University, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (MA), and Columbia University in New York City (PhD). He is a recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Research Fellowship and two research grants of the Mellon Foundation.

Chenxi Tang’s publications includes two monographs. The Geographic Imagination of Modernity: Geography, Literature, and Philosophy in German Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2008) traces the emergence of geography as one of the key conceptual strategies that European society invented to make sense of itself at the threshold of modernity in the decades around 1800.  Imagining World Order: Literature and International Law in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 (Cornell University Press, 2018) uncovers the beginning of the European visions of world order by investigating the interplay of the discourse of international law and imaginative literature in the early modern period.

As a fellow at HIAS, Chenxi Tang plans to shift attention to China in his historical study of the question of world order. Against the background of global power shifts, his project The Chinese Imagination of World Order: From the Nineteenth Century to the Present studies the clash of Chinese and European ideas of world order in the 19th century, the attempts of 20th-century Chinese intellectuals to find bearings for there country in a world dominated by the West, and finally the emergence of new visions of world order in today’s China on the basis of creative reinterpretations of its long and varied intellectual tradition.  His tandem-partner is Thomas Fröhlich, professor of the language and culture of China in the Asien-Afrika-Institut of Universität Hamburg.

Chenxi Tang‘s HIAS-Fellowship is provided by the federal and state funds acquired by the Universität Hamburg in the framework of its excellence strategy.