ACADEMIC AND RESEARCH BIO
Daniel F. Vukovich (胡德) was trained at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at UIUC (PhD 2005). He specializes in the global, intellectual, and political dimensions of the China-West relationship. While grounded in contextualized interpretation of the present era, his work pursues old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge, and the dialectics of difference and universality. His main influences are Marxist theory broadly defined and Foucault (discourse), as well as Freud, Schmitt, and heterodox Chinese thinkers such as Wang Hui (汪暉) and Gao Mobo (高默波). He grew up working class in Western PA, and proudly so.
After earlier stints at Hocking College in Appalachian Ohio and UCSC, he has worked at HKU since 2006. He has also been an Advisory Research Fellow at Southeast University (东南大学) and a Visiting Professor at East China Normal University (华东师范大学).
He has published four monographs, including the influential China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (2012) the widely reviewed Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (2019), and the first book-length critique of Hong Kong’s first handover era in relation to 2019: After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997–2019 (2022). The latter is forthcoming (2026) in a revised and expanded, Chinese edition with HKUP, 香港回歸第一階段的歷史反思 1997–2019.
A fifth monograph, After the Rise of China: Theorizing In the Interregnum is under contract with Palgrave Macmillan. It will be part of the new book series he is editing with Professors Gao Mobo and Yan Hairong (严海蓉), also entitled After the Rise of China. Co-sponsored by the CHAGS research hub, the series welcomes proposals on any aspect of contemporary China from a global and theoretically-informed, against-the-grain perspective.
Last but not least, Prof. Vukovich is an enthusiastic and happy teacher of literature, theory, and problems of culture and society.
See his websites for more info and sample texts:
https://arts.hku.hk/research/chags/
https://hku-hk.academia.edu/DanielVukovich
https://sites.google.com/view/classwebprofvukovichhku