Youtian Sun

   Youtian Sun is a scholar of French Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities). Grounded in both French and Chinese intellectual traditions, his work adopts a comparative approach that bridges French, Chinese, Japanese, and Jewish studies to rethink how cultures construct one another through processes of comparison, mediation, and secular formation. His work focuses on French republican secularism (laïcité), comparative literature, cinema studies, and the historical production of modern subjectivity.

   His current project traces a genealogy of France’s writings on China across literature, philosophy, and cinema from the Enlightenment to the present. Ranging from eighteenth-century epistolary fiction and nineteenth-century anarchist thought to early twentieth-century literature, then to postwar Franco-Chinese cinema, the aftermath of May ’68, and contemporary French detective fiction, it argues that "China" has repeatedly functioned not simply as an object of representation but as a mediating structure through which French intellectuals rethink universalism, secular education, cultural transmission, and the formation of the republican subject. More broadly, the project proposes a comparative literary account of laïcité as an intellectual practice of mediation capable of addressing the philosophical and political challenges of modern societies.

  Alongside this work, Youtian maintains active research on detective fiction and martial arts as complementary sites for investigating secular subjectivity. His work explores how practices of investigation, embodied knowledge, and aesthetic experience illuminate the relationship between individual formation, collective life, and democratic institutions across French and global cultural contexts.