Dr. Yingqi Tang
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Trained as a political theorist, I maintain interests in the history of political thought and Enlightenment intellectual history.
My current research concerns broadly the question of nature’s interaction with culture in contemporary political theory and the history of political thought. In my first book project based on the dissertation, I investigate the realization of nature by means of culture via education, with focus on the idea of Bildung, the foundational idea of the modern research university, and its translated lives in the non-European world.
At the Polonsky Academy, I plan to turn my dissertation into a book manuscript and begin my next project on the republic of letters and the possibility of humanistic education in a global context. The aim is to examine the limits of culture’s claim over nature and examine the dichotomy between the two. The two book combined illuminate what can be called the anthropological foundation of politics. Namely, our species’ embeddedness in nature, while circumscribing the human efforts to define political and social orders, also gives rise to such efforts’ many future promises.
Before joining the Polonsky Academy, I received my doctoral training in Political Science at Yale University and earned my bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and Political Science from Barnard College, Columbia University.