Comp Lit professor Haiyan Lee receives Burkhardt Fellowship

Please join us in congratulating Comparative Literature and East Asian Languages and Civilizations Professor Haiyan Lee.  She has been awarded a Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellowship for Recently Tenured Scholars from the American Council of Learned Societies.  This will allow her to spend her sabbatical year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in 2015-16.  She will begin working on her new book project entitled "A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination" (abstract below).

How has justice been envisioned and pursued in Chinese culture and society? Is “liberty and justice for all” a first principle in the Chinese legal imagination? I approach justice as a juridical, ethical, aesthetic, ecological, and cosmological concept as it emerges from a variety of verbal and visual genres ranging from traditional courtroom drama and knight-errantry tale to modern detective fiction and spy thriller, as well as media and intellectual debates on law and morality, human and animal rights, and social justice. I structure my investigation around five interlocking keywords—justice, violence, guilt, dissemblance, and the exception—and situate it at the intersection of literary genre studies, critical legal studies, moral and political philosophy, and cognitive science.