I am a first year DPhil student in Asian and Middle Eastern Studies under the supervision of Professors Henrietta Harrison and Dirk Meyer.
Born in Canada, I grew up in Scotland, where I took an undergraduate degree in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow. Afterwards, I supported myself teaching while pursuing my own research and studying Chinese language, culture and history. In 2022 I completed a master’s in philosophy at Shanghai Jiaotong University, specializing in pre-Qin philosophy and Han-era 'classical studies' (jingxue 經學). This intensive linguistic and cultural immersion was initially very challenging, but also immensely stimulating and intellectually invigorating to a degree I had not anticipated.
Today my main research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy and philology. I am particularly interested in exploring the ways in which ancient Chinese traditions have developed through interaction with both non-Chinese and modern influences. Beyond my work on Confucianism, I am fascinated by Chinese Buddhist and Daoist ideas, with special emphasis on the Zhuangzi, a pre-Qin Daoist text which I believe can be used to develop interesting new ways of thinking about modern philosophical problems.
My research at Oxford is supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council OOC-DTP Studentship, a Christ Church Scholarship and the Clarendon Fund.
DPhil topic
'"Maintaining the Timely Mean": The Three Ages in Kang Youwei’s Conception of History'
My doctoral research focusses on a central aspect of Gongyang historical ontology, the 'Three Ages', using it as the conceptual framework for a new understanding of Kang Youwei’s historical ideas in the context of their time.
Although Kang’s prominence during the 100 Days Reform has led many studies to approach him through the lens of political history, he was not just a political reformer but also a complex thinker who developed though creative engagement with indigenous Chinese traditions. Specifically, he drew on Gongyang hermeneutical traditions that purported to decode esoteric philosophical principles hidden in the Chunqiu and other classical texts.
For Kang, the 'Three Ages' function as a theoretical fulcrum, dividing history into different 'ages' according to their mutually contradictory values and institutions. Kang used this historical ontology to integrate his various incompatible reformist and utopian ideals, but at the cost of relativizing them along the temporal axis. For although he presented his utopian vision as the universalization of an idealized Confucian system, its theoretical foundations – the 'Three Ages' – were accelerating the disintegration of this ideal, by relativizing and historicizing its core values.
By interrogating the internal logic of Kang’s philosophical inconsistencies, I argue he was necessarily inconsistent, given his intellectual heritage and the historical pressures he faced. At the same time, by illuminating the complex, contingent processes that led him to think in the way he did, I hope to rescue his ideas from linear, teleological narratives that read them as forerunners of 20th century nationalist and revolutionary movements.
