I am a political scientist and philosopher who uses neuroscience to try saving our liberal democracies from collapse. I do so by researching about the neuroscience of racism, dehumanization and polarization. My aim is to construct a neo-Hobbesian, neuropolitical social contract for our fraught times. I am a fiction writer who writes philosophical fiction about the cellular and neuronal basis of the Asian female existence and biculturality. I am a performance artist who creates dance pieces and metal songs about the darkness of our brains, 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. In 2024, I was nominated for the Progressive Science Voices Award by Brand New Bundestag. Philosophie Magazin named my neuropolitical theory one of the top ideas for 2025. I joined the advisory board of the German Federation of Scientists in 2025. 

Currently I am a lecturer at Universität der Künste Berlin, where I will be teaching an interdisciplinary course on the neuropolitics of dehumanization and performance art during the 2025/26 winter semester. I am also a non-resident fellow at LMU’s Institute of Medical Psychology on Prof. Ernst Pöppel’s neuroscience research team. I was trained in political science at the University of Cambridge (BA) and Columbia University in New York (MPhil, PhD). 

I am the author of Vulnerable Minds: The Neuropolitics of Divided Societies (2022) and Hirn Statt Moral: Warum nur Neuropolitik den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt sichert (2026). 

I live in Berlin. Please send press inquiries to Günter Berg Literary Agency.

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. I was elected to the advisory board of the German Federation of Scientists in 2025. 

I am the author of Vulnerable Minds: The Neuropolitics of Divided Societies (Columbia University Press, 2022), which presents a neo-Hobbesian social contract for our fraught times based on new knowledge about our brain vulnerabilities. My German book Hirn Statt Moral: Warum nur Neuropolitik den gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt sichert (Ullstein, 2026) addresses how we can still reach the brains of those whom we disagree with the most, and what kind of educational and political strategies we need to get there. 

Interviews and quotes on anti-Asian racism, political neuroscience and democratization in East Asia have appeared in ARD, ZDF, BBC, New Scientist, Deutsche Welle, Deutschlandfunk, MDR, Radio Bremen, Bayerischer 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 and Mondial Magazin. 

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 organized 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.