Hear from Lecturer Michael Puett, Walter C. Klein Professor of Chinese History and Anthropology and the Director of the Asia Center at Harvard University

“There is no more exciting time to be enabling research and intellectual discourse on Asia…. The region is facing both unprecedented growth and unprecedented political, economic, environmental, and humanitarian challenges.”  Michael Puett, Harvard University Asia Center – 6th August 2024

He has lectured widely at the world’s leading universities. His course in Chinese philosophy is among the most popular at Harvard and in 2013 he was awarded a Harvard College Professorship for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He is widely acknowledged as one of the foremost experts on China.

His interests are focused on the inter-relations between philosophy, anthropology, history, and religion, with the hope of bringing the study of China into larger historical and comparative frameworks. He is the author of The Ambivalence of Creation: Debates Concerning Innovation and Artifice in Early China and To Become a God: Cosmology, Sacrifice, and Self-Divinization in Early China, as well as the co-author, with Adam Seligman, Robert Weller, and Bennett Simon, of Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity.

Registration for the lecture will be from 6.00pm.  The lecture will start promptly at 6.30pm and will be followed by a drinks reception in the library and adjoining reception rooms of the Royal Institution.