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, and Jewish studies to rethink the intellectual conditions under which cultures imagine one another. His research focuses on the intersections of French republican secularism (laïcité), literary and intellectual formation, and political philosophy in modern France.

   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 literary, philosophical, and visual reflections on the limits of European modernity, to postwar Franco-Chinese cinema, the aftermath of May ’68, and contemporary French detective fiction, he argues that “China” has functioned less as an exotic other than as a conceptual terrain through which France confronts questions of universalism, secular education, and the socio-historical production of the subject. More broadly, his work seeks to rethink the philosophical foundations for understanding future social and political challenges.

  Youtian maintains a sustained engagement with detective fiction and martial arts as interconnected areas of inquiry within his broader research on laïcité. His work explores how practices of investigation and embodied forms of practice contribute to the articulation of secular subjectivity across French and other cultural contexts.