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This semester, SIS is honored to welcome two new professors to our faculty ranks: Hansong Li and Sarah Khan. Li, who earned a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University, will join our faculty in the Department of Global Inquiry. He is a social scientist and humanist who writes on a range of topics, including international law and politics. To get to know one of our newest faculty members, we asked Li a few questions about his research background and professional interests.

What are your main research areas?

As an intellectual itinerant, first from biology to economics, then to philology and philosophy, I must be very concise and creative in order to “territorially” delimit my research “areas.” If there is a motif recurring through multiple strains of my research, it may be framed as a question that most grips my mind: how are ideas contested in global encounters?��

Over the years, I have written a bit on political, economic, and legal debates amidst early-modern maritime expansions and colonial contacts. Often speaking a mixed language of classical and theological tropes, arguing over nuances in the concepts of time and space, while drawing voraciously, albeit selectively, from imperfect information on the Americas and Asia, the protagonists in these stories ended up stirring and shaping institutional changes at home and abroad. And if ideas mattered in the past, we would not be so ill-advised to heed them in the here and now.

Alongside connections in the history of international thought, I write on comparisons in inter-political philosophies. Currently, I am revising a book on ideas of common justice in Western, Indian, and Chinese traditions. There, I am trying not so much to expand the scope of our normative resources in our increasingly narrow and hollow way of reasoning about politics—although it is always a good thing to know what various peoples and polities say about how else we could and should live with collective strangers—as to enrich the language in which we may create and curate a space for debate between disparate yet resonant thought-worlds. This sounds pedantic, but the stake seems rather high: if we do not learn to contest each other more meaningfully in the realm of ideas, we will only see more contestations in the language of arms.

When it comes to diagnosing the present, I have taught and written on the socioeconomic lives of businesses in the so-called Global South and Global East. So, on this front, I examine not peripatetic minds but peregrine merchants, although the link between culture and commerce in my theoretical musings is still present in my historical and analytical escapades. I have not wielded the “tools of trade” of orthodox economics for a long time. Still, in recent years, cheerful experiences of teaching a course on entrepreneurship in developing countries and another on the future of political economy reignited my Humean, Smithian, and dare I say, Marxian instincts. These days, I am coauthoring a book that casts entrepreneurs in Asia, Africa, and Latin America not as mere victims to macroeconomic mayhems but as candidate-changers of socioeconomic ecosystems. Building on this thought experiment, I hope to eventually work out a social theory of the global knowledge economy, grounded in a growing debate over how we could tame knowledge for human flourishing, and toward which common purposes we should steer our seemingly innocuous and impartial innovations.

What classes are you teaching at SIS this year? Why are these topics important for SIS students to study?

This coming autumn, I am proud to take over one of the batons of SISU 206: “Introduction to International Studies Research.” Now, you could study various allegedly “international” subjects: international relations, international law, international political economy, and international history, to name just a few famously disciplinary-minded fields whose constituents are not known for being particularly nice to��each other. You can also question what epistemological assumptions about “nation-states” have been built into various iterations of the “international” across these knowledge-industrial landscapes. But I find this conceptual ambiguity more inviting than intimidating. I hope that students come to the first class with a healthy dose of skepticism and the biggest questions possible. But throughout this not-so-smooth journey, I will make every effort to encourage them to surf into currents of international thinking, to interrogate each other and themselves about what puzzle they would like to investigate. Ultimately, this soul-searching,��regression-running journey will culminate in a research proposal to be developed further into a grand finale of their��universitarian��endeavor. So, to answer your question, this course is important for our students because, alas, it is mandatory, but my ambition is to make it as intellectually exhilarating��as��is permitted under the constraint of��curricular design and��academic rigor.

In the spring, I am exploring the idea of offering something in��comparative��social thought and ethical reasoning. Such a course, if come to life, invites students to interlocute with philosophers ancient and modern on questions of justice and the good life, within a political community and in the space between states, across different traditions of reasoning and rhetoric. Students will find themselves dialoguing with not only Western, but also��South Asian and East Asian��thinkers, with visiting guests from time to time. In a way,��that might be a mini-exercise of the “collaborative hermeneutic” that I advocate in my book. And what��on Earth��do��students��gain from such an exercise?��There is an esoteric and an exoteric answer. Esoterically, students may gain��what Tommaso Campanella��in��Apologia pro Galileo��called��libertasphilosophandi.��Well, the first step to gain the freedom of philosophic thinking is to break the invisible boundaries of our conceptual frameworks, to allow alternative epistemologies and normativities to challenge what you have always taken for granted as self-evident. But exoterically, how can we cope with an increasingly multiplex and multipolar world, where agency is diffused to Asia, Africa, and Latin America, if we only see non-Western societies as norm-takers, not as norm-creators? How can we talk to these political communities, if we do not examine the civilizations and cosmologies?��

In addition to your research, you also review operas, musicals, galleries, and books for newspapers in multiple languages. How many languages do you speak, and how did you get interested in writing reviews on theater and literature?

Tangut, I could technically “speak,” but trust me, you do not want to hear it. Sanskrit and Pali I can still chant, but use them mostly for reading, research, and occasional reflection. Greek and Latin, yes, but I cannot parse through Thucydidean and Tacitean syntaxes without drawing a plethora of diagrams. As for proficiencies in various modern European and Asian languages, they flux and reflux, depending on where I have been traveling as of late.

I am parallel-living the alternative life of a music theorist by writing music reviews. This way, I may pretend to remain part of the music community, long after I shamefully left all my instruments to rest and rust. Music, to me, is first an otherworldly aesthetic experience, which I then analyze through the critical eyes of a social scientist. I try my best do justice to the compositional textures and techniques, the setting and staging, as well the acting, voicing, and orchestration, but I always and unapologetically review works of music from the perspective of social, political, and economic thought. My prejudice is that the reflective exercise may not always yield delight or accuracy, but stretching our imaginative space in spite of our discomfort will ultimately enable us to enjoy the music to the fullest.

What are you looking forward to most about joining the SIS community?

As you know very well, I am joining a congenial and spirited group of scholars who do radically different things with such sympathies and synergies. I noticed that some of our scholars and students have spent their lives plying through books, whilst some others come from political, diplomatic, and military backgrounds. So, the demographics itself invites us to reflect on where theory meets practice.��

But let me not neglect to mention that I am enamored with the flora and fauna. It is no small horticultural feat to have crafted a functional campus into a botanical garden, with sequential layers of blossoms perfectly timed and tuned to the seasons. Between our academic arboretum and the dense, “fade-away-into-the-forest-dim” Glover Archbold groves behind my abode, this area reminds me very much of Dahlem, the idyllic, verdure-laden southwest of Berlin. I plan to conduct many Rousseauian promenades in this��rus in urbe.