The Vice-Chancellor’s Visiting Professorship Scheme is a flagship initiative designed to bring the world’s best and brightest to CUHK. The Faculty welcomes two visiting professors in the new academic year.
Professor Hilary Chappell
Department of Linguistics and Modern Languages
“During my stay at CUHK, I hope to promote new collaborations with colleagues at my home institute.”
Professor Chappell is a specialist in the typology of Sinitic (Chinese) languages, and currently holds the Research Chair in Linguistic Typology of East Asian Languages at one of France’s grands établissements – the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) – a graduate school in Paris. She has directed several projects at national and European levels focused on questioning and rethinking the typological profile of Sinitic languages in terms of their variation and diversity. Her European Research Council project led to the creation of a new series with De Gruyter Mouton in Berlin: Sinitic languages of China: Typological descriptions, for which four comprehensive grammars have already been published under her editorship.
As a CUHK visiting professor, she plans to conduct a workshop on border linguistics and language contact, and establish an exchange programme for professors and graduate students with the EHESS. Her own project is to write up a large part of the grammar of Waxiang during her stay, based on fieldwork of 12 months in Xiangxi, Hunan.
Professor Christopher Fraser
Department of Philosophy
“I look forward to working with CUHK undergraduates and graduate students on relatively underexplored topics in Chinese thought, such as mind, language, and epistemology.”
Professor Fraser joins CUHK from the University of Toronto, where he holds the Richard Charles and Esther Yewpick Lee Chair in Chinese Thought and Culture in the Department of Philosophy and the Department of East Asian Studies and is also Acting Director of the Robert H. N. Ho Centre for Buddhist Studies. Professor Fraser's main area of expertise is Chinese philosophy and its relevance to contemporary philosophical issues. His most recent book is Late Classical Chinese Thought. He also has two forthcoming works, Zhuangzi: An Annotated Translation and Zhuangzi: Ways of Wandering the Way. He is currently working on a project on debates in Chinese traditional political philosophy over the role of institutional standards and another project exploring ethical naturalism in the Qing dynasty thinker Dai Zhen.
