The UAB awards honorary doctorate to Sinologist Anne Cheng

The UAB awarded an honorary doctorate to French Sinologist Anne Cheng on 28 November at the Rectorat building. Cheng, author of one of the most important works on the history of Chinese thought, is also one of the world's main academic experts in this matter.

13/11/2019

On 28 November, the conference hall of the Rectorat building hosted the awards ceremony in which Sinologist Anne Cheng received an honorary doctorate after being proposed for the award by the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. The event was presided by Rector Margarita Arboix and Dr Cheng was sponsored by lecturer Joaquín Beltrán, Head of the Department of Translation and Interpreting and East Asian Studies. Simultatneous interpretation was offered by students of the master's degree in Conference Interpreting of the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting.

Dr Cheng attended the École Normale Supérieure and earned her PhD in Sinology from the University of Paris 7, Denis Diderot. Her teaching and research career has taken place at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales and the Collège de France, where she is chair professor in the intellectual history of China. She is author of Histoire de la pensée chinoise (Éditions du Seuil) which is considered to be one of the Western world's most influential works on the subject. Dr Cheng is a firm defender of the original concepts of Confucianism and therefore distances herself from the neo-Confucianism interpretations which make it out to be a conservative philosophy.

The new honorary doctorate has worked together with the UAB for a number of years now. In 2006, as part of the Year of East Asia activities at the university, she gave a conference entitled "The Modern Invention of Chinese Philosophy". And in 2003, the Spanish translation of her work, Historia del pensamiento chino (Edicions Bellaterra), translated by UAB lecturer Anne-Hélène Suárez-Girard, was awarded the Ángel Crespo Translation Prize. A conference by Dr Cheng given at the University of Granada was included in the work entitled Perspectivas chinas (Bellaterra), published by lecturer Joaquín Beltrán.