The UAB to award an honorary doctorate to Sinologist Anne Cheng

27/09/2018

The UAB voted in favour of awarding an honorary doctorate to French Sinologist Anne Cheng, one of the world's main experts in Confucianism and Chinese philosophy, after being proposed for the award by the Faculty of Translation and Interpreting. She will be sponsored by Joaquín Beltrán, lecturer of the Department of Translation and Interpreting & East Asian Studies.

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. 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 Cheng given at the University of Granada was included in the work entitled Perspectivas chinas (Bellaterra), published by lecturer Joaquín Beltrán.