Introduction

Lisa Indraccolo is Associate Professor of Chinese Studies at Tallinn University. She earned her Ph.D. from Ca’ Foscari University in 2010 with a thesis on the early Chinese “sophistic” text Gongsun Longzi. She gained several years of research experience as a postdoc fellow at the University of Zurich, where she carried out an independent research project on argumentation and persuasion in early Chinese philosophical texts (2011–2016). She then collaborated with Wolfgang Behr on the research project “A Tangled Web of Sayings – Structural and phonological patterning in the Hanfeizi” (2016–2020), funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. In Zurich, she was also an active member of the interdisciplinary cluster University Research Priority Program “Asia and Europe” (2011–2014). Her research aims at providing a bridge between philosophy and philology, and focuses on Classical Chinese thought, literature, and culture in pre-imperial and early imperial China (Warring States and Han).

Areas of research

Early Chinese philosophical Masters and “Masters literature” (zishu)

Confucian political and moral thought

Classical Chinese rhetoric, especially the techniques of argumentation (bian) and persuasion (shui)

structural and rhetorical patterns of early Chinese texts

conceptual and intellectual history of premodern China, also from a comparative perspective

comparative philosophy

cross-cultural encounters and early contacts between China and other neighboring countries (Japan and the South-East)