July 6, 2016 Peng Guoxiang Named Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North

Press Contact: Donna Urschel (202) 707-1639
Public Contact: Jason Steinhauer (202) 707-0213

Chinese scholar Peng Guoxiang has arrived at the Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center as the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North. His tenure began in July and he will be in residence for six months.

Peng is an accomplished scholar of Chinese philosophy and the Confucian tradition and its influence on modern-day Chinese society. He is currently the Qiu Shi Distinguished Professor of Chinese Philosophy, Intellectual History and Religions at Zhejiang University, and director of the Center for Cultural China Studies, Institute for Advanced Humanistic Studies at Peking University.

Peng will spend six months at the Library of Congress continuing his research on the religious dimensions of Confucianism and the political and social thought of contemporary Confucianism. His work strives to present a more accurate, balanced and complete picture of Confucian tradition through analysis of original sources and secondary literature in history, philosophy and religion. His work also attempts to deepen contemporary understandings of Chinese thought and cultures in relation to other global traditions.

Peng’s publications include: "This Worldly Concern: The Political and Social Thought of Mou Zongsan (1909-1995)" (2016), "Revision and New Discovery: Historical Study of Pre-Modern Confucianism from Northern Song till Early Qing Dynasty" (2013 and 2015), "Reconstruction of This Culture of Ours: Confucianism and The Contemporary World" (2013) and "Confucian Tradition from Classical Period to Its Contemporary Transformation: Speculation and Interpretation" (2012).

Peng also serves as the vice president of the International Society for Comparative Studies of Chinese and Western Philosophy. He has previously been the Arthur Lynn Andrews Distinguished Visiting Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawaii; a visiting professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong; a visiting scholar at Harvard University; a visiting research fellow at Bochum Ruhr University, the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Germany, the Goethe University in Frankfurt, the National Taiwan University, and a distinguished visiting scholar at the National University of Singapore. In 2009, he received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Research Award, which is bestowed by the Humboldt Foundation and the Ministry of Education and Research of Germany.

The Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North is a distinguished senior research position in residence at the Library appointed by the Librarian of Congress. Using research facilities and services at the Library of Congress, the scholar is expected to explore the history of the regions of North America, Europe, Russia and East Asia, using the immense foreign-language collections in the specialized reading rooms of the Library.

Through a generous endowment from John W. Kluge, the Library of Congress established the Kluge Center in 2000 to bring together the world's best thinkers to stimulate and energize one another, to distill wisdom from the Library's rich resources, and to interact with policymakers in Washington. For more information about the Kluge Center visit www.loc.gov/kluge/.

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PR 16-113
2016-07-07
ISSN 0731-3527