Short Biography

Hans van Ess, born 1962 near Frankfurt, grew up in Tübingen in Southern Germany. After studying Sinology, Turkic Studies and Philosophy at the University of Hamburg he spent two years at Fudan University in Shanghai before finishing a PhD on China’s history of ancient thought in 1992. From 1992-1995 van Ess worked as an area manager at the German Asia-Pacific Business Association in Hamburg and from 1995 to 1998 as assistant professor at the Institute for Sinology of the University of Heidelberg. In 1998 he took over a chair at the Institute for Sinology at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. In 2015 he was elected president of the Max-Weber-Foundation – German Institutes in the Humanities abroad. Since 2013 he was Vice-President for International Affairs at LMU, since 2019 he serves as Vice-President for Research.