Maria Adele Carrai

Katholieke Universiteit Leuven; Harvard University

Criminal justice reforms in Republican China 

2018-2019: Spring

Maria Adele Carrai is a senior researcher at the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies - KU Leuven and a fellow at the Asia Center of Harvard University. Her research focuses on China’s legal history and how it affects the country’s foreign policy. Her book project A Genealogy of the Concept of Sovereignty in China from 1840 is now under contract with Cambridge University Press. Departing from a legal orientalist approach, it looks at the way Chinese intellectuals, political figures, and diplomats appropriated and articulated the notion of sovereignty in their foreign policy within the new discourse of international law in the period between 1840 to the present. Before she arrived at the Italian Academy of Columbia University, she was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute of Florence (2015-17), Global Hauser Fellow at the New York University Law School (2016-17), and Fellow at the Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program (2017-18). She was trained as a sinologist and political scientist in Italy (University La Sapienza, Ca’ Foscari University, University of Bologna), the UK (Erasmus scholarship at the School of Oriental and African Studies) and China (Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs Scholarship). After having spent one year as visiting doctoral researcher at NYU she completed her Ph.D. in 2016 at the University of Hong Kong, where she was a recipient of the Hong Kong Government Ph.D. Fellowship, the Swire Scholarship, and the Award for Outstanding Research Postgraduate Student for 2015-16.

Web page: https://mariadelecarrai.com/