Danica Cao

Danica Cao is a PhD candidate in the Philosophy of Religions at the University of Chicago Divinity School. She had previously received a BA with majors in Philosophy and the College of Letters (European literature, history, philosophy) from Wesleyan University, and an MA in the Philosophy of Religions from the University of Chicago Divinity School.

Attentive to the usefulness and limitations of "philosophy" and "religion" as categories, she engages with modern Chinese articulations of Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist traditions in a historically grounded yet philosophically driven manner, in conversation with Asian and comparative philosophy, modern Chinese intellectual history, and critical theory. Her dissertation focuses on issues of philosophical and political subjectivity as distinctively articulated through traditional resources in the work of the late Qing and early Republican revolutionary thinker Zhang Taiyan (1869-1936).