Visiting scholar Dr. Alexander Görlach has visited at Center for East Asia Democratic Studies on August 1, 2017. In the academic year 2017-2018 he will be serving as visiting scholar to the Center for East Asia Democratic Studie at the College for Social Sciences of National Taiwan University. Dr. Alexander Görlach is an affiliate to the Government Department of Harvard University, where he conducts a project on Abendland (Occident) with faculty professor Daniel Ziblatt. Prior to that he was a visiting scholar, guestlecturer and J. F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow to both Harvard's Center for European Studies and Harvard Divinity School. Alex holds a PhD in linguistics and another one in comparative religion. He studied at the Papal University Gregoriana, Al-Azhar University Cairo and the Faculty of Theology at the University of Ankara. His current work is on political and religious identities, how they are created and obtain influence on societies and policy making. He also looks into secularism and pluralism, and he is interested in theories of cosmopolitanism. After his period of time at National Taiwan University Dr. Görlach will become a visiting fellow to the Center of the Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, UK.

Alexander Görlach is a senior fellow to the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs and a senior advisor to the Berggruen Institute. At Carnegie he works on Latin American identities and their contribution to a Western narrative. At Berggruen he looks into democracy in the digital age and the influence AI will have on societies. In the framework of the Berggruen's Institute Center on Philosophy and Culture he works on Confucianism and its influence on contemporary Asien politics and societies. Alexander is also known as the founder and editor-in-chief of the debate-magazine The European and the media-initiative www.saveliberaldemocracy.com. He is an op-ed contributor to the New York Times. While in Taiwan he will also be lecturing at City University Hong Kong and the Graduate School for International Studies at Seoul National University.