PhD (Illinois)
Chairperson and Undergraduate Coordinator
Director, China, Humanities, and Global Studies Research Hub
RRST 9.34
vukovich@hku.hk
3917 7934
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. His work is grounded in 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 Marxist discourse and 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 proudly so.
After earlier stints at Hocking College in Appalachian Ohio and UC Santa Cruz, he has worked at HKU since 2006. He has been an Advisory Research Fellow in the School of Marxism at Southeast University (东南大学) in Nanjing and a Visiting Professor of Politics 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 (Routledge 2012) the widely reviewed Illiberal China: The Ideological Challenge of the P.R.C. (Palgrave 2019), and the first book-length critique of Hong Kong’s first handover era in relation to the events of 2019-2020: After Autonomy: A Post-Mortem for Hong Kong’s First Handover, 1997–2019 (Palgrave, 2022). The latter is forthcoming (August 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, the title of which is also 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, cultural studies, and ideas.