Prof. Zhang Chunjie

Chunjie Zhang is working on the project, World as Method: Cosmopolitan Thinking in German and Chinese Modernist Cultures, that seeks to compare cosmopolitan thinking in German and Chinese discourses in the first half of the twentieth century. In the current theoretical debates on cosmopolitanism, scholars point out that it is not necessarily always the national or local cultures that construct incommensurable values and cause irreconcilable conflicts. Rather their approaches to envision global orders and their expectations from others on an international scale give rise to disputes and disagreements. The vibrant intellectual exchanges between Europe and China and the cosmopolitan impulses among German and Chinese thinkers from the 1890s to the 1940s provide us rich resources for exploring the discrepancies and similarities of cosmopolitan visions in cultural, political, and global contexts.

Zhang is associate professor of German at the University of California at Davis. She is the author of Transculturality and German Discourse in the Age of European Colonialism (Northwestern UP 2017). Her research interests include the global eighteenth century, postcolonial theory, comparative modernisms, and Asian-German studies. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University after earning an Magister degree at Universität Tübingen und a BA from Peking University, China.