Wiebke Denecke

Wiebke Denecke (魏樸和), S. C. Fang Professor of Chinese Language and Culture and Professor of East Asian Literatures and Philosophies at MIT. She studies the literary and philosophical traditions of China, Japan and Korea, comparative studies of East Asia and the premodern world, world literature, the politics of cultural heritage and memory, and the transformation of the Humanities in an age of STEM.

Her books include The Dynamics of Masters Literature: Early Chinese Thought from Confucius to Han Feizi, Classical World Literatures: Sino-Japanese and Greco-Roman Comparisons, The Norton Anthology of World Literature, The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to World Literature, The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature, a three-volume literary history of Japan from an East Asian perspective (Nihon “bun”gakushi. A New History of Japanese “Letterature”; in Japanese), and Shared Pasts for Shared Futures: Prototyping a Comparative Global Humanities (special issue of History of Humanities).

Denecke is Founding Editor-in-Chief of The Hsu-Tang Library of Classical Chinese Literature, which features smartly scholarly and eminently readable translations of three millennia of East Asia’s literary heritage. She leads the  MIT Comparative Global Humanities Initiative, which spearheads the global transformation of the humanities in an age of STEM and brings stakeholders from across academia, the public sector and society together to work towards a shared future in challenging times.

https://lit.mit.edu/denecke/