Announcing: List of Anglophone Chinese Philosophy PhD Programs

Jim Behuniak, Yong Huang, Alexus McLeod, and I have assembled what we hope to be a comprehensive, alphabetically-ordered list of Anglophone PhD programs in Chinese philosophy. The list will reside here at Warp, Weft, and Way, and we will update it as often as necessary to keep it current. (There is also a link to the list on the top right of the home page.) We have a few requests:

  • If you are associated with one of the programs listed, and notice any errors or omissions, please let me know!
  • If you are associated with one of the programs listed, and would like us to add anything in the “further information” area, including links that might be particularly helpful to someone considering graduate study in Chinese philosophy in your program, please let me know.
  • If you feel your program should be on our list, by all means contact one of us. We are aiming to be inclusive, and apologize if we have missed any programs.

Now that we have the basic structure of the page done, we can also consider adding additional types of information. Anyone with any good ideas, please say so in the comments.

16 thoughts on “Announcing: List of Anglophone Chinese Philosophy PhD Programs

    • Hi Paul — thanks for the reminder! I have added the information to the page: take a look and see if I’ve got it all right.

  1. 1.
    Many of the people I would want to study with if I were pursuing such a degree are in institutions that don’t grant one. If there are any formal arrangements by which a grad student can have someone from another institution on her committee? And if so, is there any way to define something listable in that area—say, teachers who report having in the past had at least one such arrangement?

    2.
    I think it would make sense to list programs granting non-philosophy Ph.D degrees in what amounts approximately to the study of the history of Chinese philosophy or some area of it. To avoid the burden of judgment calls, one might simply list all such programs that put themselves forward for the list.

    • Thanks, Bill. On 2, I think that’s what our “cognate” category is meant to cover, though it definitely needs filling out. Certainly we’ll be happy to add other programs to that rudimentary list.

      On 1, my initial reaction, for what that is worth, is that this falls more into the “advice about how to pursue graduate studies in Chinese philosophy” category than the listing of programs (as an alternative way of presenting information to the vexed ranking process) that we are doing here. But I certainly would have no opposition to someone compiling such a list, and myself am serving as an outside member on PhD committees at other institutions now.

  2. The Australian National University has both Bronwyn Finnigan and Koji Tanaka on its faculty in the school of philosophy. Both work on Buddhist philosophy. (Koji Tanaka no longer works at Auckland.)

  3. Good job, gentlemen, for working to update this. I would like to note that Indiana University, listed under the “cognate programs” at the end, has now hired a third early China person, Nick Vogt, in EALC. More info on Nick:

    P. Nicholas Vogt joins SGIS as assistant professor in East Asian Languages & Cultures specializing in early Chinese history. He is a scholar on the cultural and religious history of early China, studying the dynamics of sovereignty and royal succession. Professor Vogt received his PhD in History and East Asian Languages and Cultures from Columbia University. He joins us from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in Germany.

    So we’re pretty stocked for people that have interests in pre-Han and Han materials. Michael and I have much more say about applications in Religious Studies, but I think Philosophy is starting to become more aware of the potential for doing Chinese philosophy here, partly through the efforts of Susan Blake, who was a student of the chair of the Philosophy Department, Gary Ebbs.

  4. Hm. When people submit changes (or corrections), they’ll want the changes flagged in some way so they’ll be noticed. Maybe there should be a small “Latest Changes” section at the head of the main list, so that they’ll be seen even if they’re just submitted by email.

    • Thanks, Bill; I have now done that with today’s updates, and will continue to do so (letting older changes drop off the list after a while). What do you think?

  5. Please include Eastern Michigan University under the MA programs. We’re a relatively new program, and we just obtained a significant amount of funding for future students.

  6. Dear Steve,

    This is Manuel Rivera, doctoral student at the Philosophy and Religious Studies Program of the University of Macau. I have been told to help you update the entry on our program in the list. Please kindly add Victoria Harrison (https://fah.umac.mo/staff/staff-philosophy/victoria-harrison/) to the list of faculty members. She specializes on analytic philosophy of religion with a focus on ancient Indian and classical Chinese philosophies. Also, our program is currently accepting PhD students and steadily growing every year. This applies to the research projects of various faculty members but most notably to the one Professor Moeller is currently directing, namely, “Daoist Philosophy in Contemporary Contexts: Strategies of Sanity in Today’s World”. There are three students currently writing their doctoral dissertations under this funding scheme, including me. For further information about our program, please follow this link: https://fah.umac.mo/philosophy/programmes/

    Best,

    Manuel

  7. It should be noted that Bryan Van Norden will be at Yale-NUS (and thus affiliated with NUS)for the next two years.

    Prospective students might also be interested to know that the Singaporean Chinese philosophy community between NUS, its affiliated faculty at Yale-NUS, and Nanyang Technological University is quite friendly. Grad students and faculty often attend reading groups, talks, and lectures between universities. (For instance, I attended a class at NTU on Neo-Confucianism, attended a classical Chinese reading group at NTU, and was invited to present in Taiwan by Yale-NUS–all despite being a student at NUS.)

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