Research areas:

• Euro-Chinese contacts
• Intercultural philosophy
• Asian studies
• Non-European collections

Biography:

Helena Motoh graduated in philosophy and sinology in 2001 at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. She defended her PhD thesis “Reception of the ideas of Chinese philosophy in Early Modern European Philosophy of the 18th Century” in 2006 at the Department for Philosophy of the same Faculty.

She is a senior research associate at the Institute for Philosophical Studies of the Science and Research Centre Koper and an assistant professor at the Department for Asian Studies of the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. At the Science and Research Centre Koper she also serves as the head of the Centre for Asian Studies. She is a member of the Science and Technology Council of the Government of the Republic of Slovenia.

In previous years she taught at the Department for Philosophy, Department of Anthropology and Department for Apllied Linguistics of the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Primorska. For several consecutive years she was a guest lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, University of Zagreb, Croatia and at the Faculty of Arts, University Juraj Dobrila of Pula, Croatia.

The outcomes of her research were published in scholarly journals and monographs in Slovenia and abroad, in the form of 4 monographs, 12 chapters in monographs, 25 scientific papers, 4 published conference papers, 19 published conference abstracts and media presentations. She co-authored the web page VAZ - East-Asian Collections in Slovenia and the database of East-Asian objects in Slovenian collections

In 2009 she received the Award of Scientific Excellence of the University of Primorska. In 2020, together with the project team, she received the »Prometej znanosti« award for excellence in communicating science.

Research:

Her research work is part of the research programme Asian Languages and Cultures (P6-0243, from 2014 onwards) and a number of national and international research projects, e. g. East Asian collections in Slovenia: Slovenia in global exchange of objects and ideas with East Asia (2018―2021, J7-9429), Slovenian women missionaries in India: A forgotten chapter in intercultural relations (2017―2020, J6-8258); Confucian revival and the theoretical foundations of Chinese modernisation (2014―2017) in Between Politics and Ethics: Towards A New World Culture of Hospitality and Non-violence (2013―2016, J6-5565).

Helena Motoh is the editor-in-chief of the scholarly journal Poligrafi and the editorial board member of the of the Založba /*cf. publishing house. She is also a founding member and board member of the European Association for Chinese Philosophy (EACP), a member of the European Association for Chinese Studies (EACP), a member of the European Association for Asian Art and Archaeology (EAAA) and a member of the Society for Comparative Religion (Slovenia) and of Slovene Philosophical Society.