Profile

Maria Adele Carrai is a FWO [PEGASUS]² Marie Curie Fellow at the Leuven Center for Global Governance Studies of KU Leuven and Princeton-Harvard China and the World Program Fellow (2017-18).

Her research focuses on China's legal history and how it affects China's foreign policy. She was trained as a sinologist and political scientist in Italy (La Sapienza University, Ca' Foscari University, University of Bologna), the UK (SOAS, Erasmus) and China (University of Hong Kong, CUPL). After receiving her PhD in 2016 at the University of Hong Kong, she held a Max Weber Fellowship at the European University Institute of Florence (2015-17) and was a Global Hauser Fellow at the New York University Law School (2016-17) and a visiting scholar at Columbia University (2017). Her thesis "A Genealogy of Sovereignty in Modern China, 1840 - present" looks at how Chinese intellectuals, political figures and diplomats articulated the notion of sovereignty in their foreign policy during the period in question. The study, currently under peer review with Cambridge University Press for publication, reveals how China, in deviating from the teleology imposed by the West and actively appropriating and manipulating Western international legal norms, has emerged as a key actor in the globalization of international law.

Maria Adele's general research interests include international law and relations, Western and Chinese legal and political philosophy, legal history, Chinese foreign policy. She is a native speaker of Italian, is fluent in Chinese and French, and has a basic knowledge of Japanese and Arabic.