This year the theme is “Legal Humanities in Global Asia,” and our keynote speaker is Professor Li Chen, a renowned scholar in the field of modern Chinese history. Professor Chen currently serves as Associate Professor of History and Global Asia Studies at the Department of History at the University of Toronto. His research and teaching interests include late Imperial and modern China (15th-20th centuries), Chinese law and society, Sino-Western relations, international law and history, and empire and postcolonial studies. His research has been featured in many of the top journals in the field, including Law & History Review, Late Imperial China, Journal of the History of International Law, and The Asian Journal of Law & Society. His first monograph, Chinese Law in Imperial Eyes, received the Association for Asian Studies’ 2018 Joseph Levenson Book Prize (for pre-1900 China) and Honorable Mention for the 2017 Peter Gonville Stein Book Award of the American Society for Legal History.
Professor Chen is co-editor of Chinese Law: Knowledge, Practice, and Transformation, 1530s-1950s (Brill, 2015) (with Madeleine Zelin), and 《学术之路：跨学科国际学者对谈集》(Pathways of Scholarship: Reflective and Methodological Conversations with International Scholars in Humanities and Social Sciences (in Chinese) (Shangwu yinshuguan, 2023). He is also author of a new Chinese book《帝国时代的法律、知识与权力》(Law, Knowledge, and Power in the Age of Empire) (Shangwu yinshuguan, 2024) and expects to complete another SSHRC-funded English monograph in fall 2024, entitled Invisible Power and Technocratic Governance: Legal Specialists and Juridical Capital in Late Imperial China, 1651-1911. Professor Chen is a member of the editorial board of the Law and History Review (since 2013), Law & Social Inquiry, and Journal of World History. He was the founding President (2014-2017) and current director of the International Society for Chinese Law and History (since 2014). He served as Associate Chair (2015-2016) and Chair of the Department of Historical and Cultural Studies (2016-2019) at the University of Toronto.