Camila YaDeau is a PhD candidate in the Department of Rhetoric with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory. She holds a BA in Philosophy from Yale University. Her interdisciplinary research brings together comparative political theory, intellectual history, China studies, post-colonial theory and literary theory of translation. Her dissertation, “Reconstructing the Political: Yan Fu, Liang Qichao and the Genealogy of Chinese Liberalism,” examines the relationship between liberalism, nationalism and state power in Chinese interpretations of liberalism during the long 20th century.
In support of her dissertation, Camila has been awarded the Program in Critical Theory’s Dissertation Research Grant and the Republic of China East Asian Fellowship (Ministry of Education, Taiwan). During the 2018 to 2019 academic year, she was the recipient of the Blakemore-Freeman Fellowship, supporting her study of Mandarin, classical Chinese and Chinese philosophy at National Taiwan University in Taipei. The Allan Sharlin Memorial Award for Research from UC Berkeley’s Institute for International Studies supported her continued research in Taiwan during the Fall of 2019. Prior to coming to Berkeley, Camila studied Chinese during the 2012-2013 academic year at Tsinghua University, Beijing as a Richard U. Light fellow.
Camila published an article entitled “Translingual Encounters: Freedom and the Social Organism in Liang Qichao’s Reading of Kant,” which appeared in the May 2021 issue of TRANSIT. During the 2021-2023 academic years, she has been a visiting scholar at the Freie Universität, Berlin, affiliated with the Department of History and Cultural Studies History. In the fall of 2023, she was a Visiting Scholar at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin, Department of Philosophy, where she joined the Politically Engaged Philosophy Workshop (PEP) and presented the paper “Towards a Theory of Peripheral Liberalism."
Early-modern and modern Anglo European political theory, modern Chinese intellectual history, pre-modern and modern Chinese political philosophy, postcolonial studies, 19 th and 20 th -century Continental philosophy, theory of translation, and philosophy of history.
