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On July 18, the British Academy announced its list of 84 newly elected Fellows for 2024, including 30 International Fellows. Academia Sinica Academician David Der-wei Wang and Distinguished Research Fellow Dr. Joseph Cho Wai Chan were honored as International Fellows, recognizing their significant research contributions.

Academician David Der-wei Wang’s specialties are Modern and Contemporary Chinese and Sinophone Literature, Late Qing fiction and drama, and Comparative Literary Theory. He is the Edward C. Henderson Professor in Chinese Literature and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, and a Corresponding Research Fellow at the Institute of Chinese Literature and Philosophy, Academia Sinica. He was elected Academician of Academia Sinica in 2004. In recent years, Wang has studied the dialogue between literature, history, and cultural history. Wang’s recent publications include The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and Artists through the 1949 Crisis (Columbia, 2014) and Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China (Brandeis, 2020).

Dr. Joseph Cho Wai Chan specializes in political philosophy, Confucian political philosophy, and Hong Kong studies. He previously served as Professor and Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong and as a Visiting Professor at the University Center for Human Values at Princeton University. He is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Academia Sinica, where he conducts extensive research on Confucianism, political thought, and contemporary democratic theory at the Center for the Study of Political Thought. His notable works include Confucian Perfectionism: A Political Philosophy for Modern Times (Princeton University Press, 2014) and Public Policymaking in Hong Kong: Civic Engagement and State-Society Relations in a Semi-Democracy (Routledge, 2013).

Founded in 1902, the British Academy is the UK’s national academy for the humanities and social sciences, encompassing 21 sections, including Classical Antiquity, History of Art and Music, Anthropology and Geography, Law, Philosophy, Education, Linguistics and Philology, and Economics and Economic History. Wang’s fellowship is under the “Modern Languages, Literatures and other Media from 1830” section; Chan’s fellowship is under the “Political Studies: Political Theory, Government and International Relations” section. Fellows of the British Academy (FBA) are recognized for their outstanding academic achievements in the humanities and social sciences and the academy currently includes over 1,700 fellows.