I am a political philosopher who uses neuroscience to save our liberal democracies from collapse. I do so by researching about the political neuroscience of racism, dehumanization and polarization — creating a neo-Hobbesian social contract based on our brain vulnerabilities. I am a fiction writer who writes books about Asian immigrant identity and what it means to be human in the no-man’s-land between conflicting cultures. I am a performance artist who choreographs dance pieces about the Asian female body, patriarchal oppression and sensual liberation.

My interdisciplinary work is grown out of a vision that I call “Gesamtkunstbefreiung”. All my works are created around the question of why we dehumanize each other, and how humanization can be achieved not just through abstract values but our bodies as whole. My desire is to understand and liberate from the brain cell upwards. I grew up in Germany as the child of Chinese immigrants from Hunan, and have since lived in China, the UK, the US, Finland, and Taiwan. I have been described as one of the most important intellectual voices in the Asian German diaspora. In 2024, I was nominated for the Progressive Science Voices Award by Brand New Bundestag. 

I was trained in political science at the University of Cambridge (B.A.) and Columbia University (M.Phil, Ph.D.), and am currently a non-resident research fellow at the Institute of Medical Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich.

After three pandemic years in Taiwan, I am now back in Berlin. 

Born in Hunan, China, I grew up in Germany (Bayern and Nordrhein-Westfalen) from age two onwards. Starting at fifteen, I began publishing award-winning German short stories about identity, biculturality and finding home in a hypermobile world. Creating literature was the first way of making sense of myself and the world around me.

I spent the final years of my high school education at the German Embassy School Beijing, which were formative years for my inner bicultural conflicts and the vision of creating a new language and philosophy for intercultural people like myself. 

I studied political philosophy at the University of Cambridge, Christ’s College (B.A.), where I also founded the Thinking Society with Quentin Skinner. My B.A. thesis was on political theology and totalitarianism in Hobbes, Leo Strauss, Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt, advised by Duncan Kelly. 

I wrote an interdisciplinary Ph.D. dissertation on the political neuroscience of racial exclusion and dehumanization at Columbia University (M.Phil, Ph.D.). My advisers were social neuroscientist Lasana Harris, International relations scholars Jack Snyder and the late Robert Jervis, and political theorist David Johnston. 

I was a scholarship recipient of the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, the Cambridge European Trust, and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute.

I was a lecturer at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville 2016-17 and adjunct faculty at Columbia’s Global Mental Health Lab. Currently I am a guest researcher at the Institute of Medical Psychology, Ludwig-Maximilians University Munich and a visiting fellow at the Department of Political Science, National Taiwan University. In 2022, I was elected to the German Federation of Scientists. 

I am the author of Vulnerable Minds: The Neuropolitics of Divided Societies (Columbia University Press, 2022) and co-editor of the Routledge Handbook of Neuropolitics (together with Matt Qvortrup, forthcoming).

Interviews and quotes on anti-Asian racism, political neuroscience and democratization in East Asia have appeared in ARD, ZDF, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandfunk, MDR, Radio Bremen, Bayrischer Rundfunk, DIE ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, NZZ, TAZ, Berliner Zeitung, Taipei Times, Radio Taiwan International, China.Table, flip.de, Amnesty Germany, Philosophie Magazin, Mondial Magazin, CGTN and Newsy. 

I was an artist-in-residence at Taipei’s Treasure Hill Artist Village 2021-2022, where I worked on a feminist novel set in Beijing, entitled Lotte in Peking. It explores which historical and cultural wounds drive Chinese ethnonationalism in the 21st century, and how China can find a more humanizing narrative about its own identity.

At Treasure Hill, I also created an anti-patriarchal dance project about the Asian female body, which has been selected to be sent to the moon with the Arch Mission Foundation’s Lunar Library Project.

Together with Alice Hérait, I organize Klartext Salon 坦白沙龍 in Taipei, a platform for political and civil society debates that aims to advance Taiwan’s democratic discourse. 

I am the lead singer of the Taipei-based doom metal band Neuropathik, where I appear under my stage name Ragnhild Yu. We perform German Mandarin songs about the darkness of our brains, inspired by Goethe, Nietzsche, Adorno and Hobbes quotes, as well as Taiwan nature and ghosts. 

To me, neuropolitics, literature, performance art and activism are all part of a larger vision that I have for my life’s work, which I term “Gesamtkunstbefreiung“: liberating myself and those on the margins of identity from the brain cell up, creating a new embodied language and philosophy through which to humanize ourselves.