ACADEMIC BIO
Daniel F. Vukovich (胡德) was trained at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at UIUC (PhD in English, 2005). He specializes in the global, intellectual, and political dimensions of the China-West relationship. His work is grounded in the contextualized interpretation of the present era, yet concerned with age-old problems of representation, the politics of knowledge, and the dialectics of difference and universality. His main influences are Marx/Marxism, Nietzsche- Foucault, 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 worked as a teacher before completing his PhD.
At HKU since 2006, he has also been an Advisory Research Fellow in the School of Marxism at Southeast University (东南大学) and a Visiting Professor of Politics at East China Normal University (华东师范大学).
He is the author of the influential China and Orientalism: Western Knowledge Production and the PRC (Routledge 2012), Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019), and the first book-length critique of the events of 2019-2020: After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave, 2022). The latter appears in a revised and expanded, Chinese edition as香港回歸第一階段的歷史反思 1997–2019 (HKUP, August 2026).
His next 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, the title of which is also After the Rise of China https://link.springer.com/series/60687 . Co-sponsored by CHAGS, the series welcomes proposals on any aspect of contemporary China from a global and theoretically-informed, against-the-grain perspective.
Last but certainly not least, Prof. Vukovich is an enthusiastic teacher of an annual first-year course on reading and interpretation, as well as classes in critical theory and problems of “culture and society.”