Xinzhi Zhao

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Research Interests

Modern Western political, social, and economic thought; Enlightenment political thought; political and social epistemology; knowledge and democracy; political realism; comparative political thought

Biography

Xinzhi Zhao graduated from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in August 2024 and is currently a lecturer in the Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE) program at the University of Maryland, College Park. At UW–Madison, Xinzhi studied political theory with a second field in comparative politics. Her peer-reviewed articles can be found in The Adam Smith Review (Vol. 14, 2024) and Política & Sociedade (Vol. 20, No. 47, 2021). She also made an invited contribution to Hobbes Studies (Vol. 35, Issue 1, 2022).

Her dissertation, “The Enlightenment of Interests: David Hume and Adam Smith on Philosophers, the Public, and the Pursuit of Interests,” examines Hume’s and Smith’s conceptions of individual and group interests and their approaches to enlightening their readers’ perceptions of interests. Through the two historical cases, Xinzhi aims to explore how accounts of interests can both be a source of normativity in political theory and a medium for social scientists’ public engagement. Her dissertation won the department’s “Best Dissertation in Political Theory Award” in 2024.

In addition to her focus on Enlightenment political thought, Xinzhi has a growing interest in realist theories of liberal democracy and comparative political thought. She is now working on a paper that examines the historical and comparative approaches in the contemporary Chinese economic historian and public intellectual Qin Hui (秦晖)’s defense of liberal democracy.

Aside from her research, Xinzhi is passionate about teaching. At UW–Madison, she won the department’s “Inaugural Teaching Assistant Award” in 2020 and was selected by the College of Letters and Science as a Teaching Mentor in 2022. At UMD, she teaches three advanced undergraduate courses each semester, including “Social Philosophy and Political Economy,” “Topics in the History of Philosophy,” and “Contemporary Political Philosophy.”

Originally from Beijing, Xinzhi received bachelor’s degrees in international politics and history (2012) and a master’s degree in comparative politics (2015) from Peking University. She has also been an exchange student at the University of Tokyo and Seoul National University. Before coming to Madison, she studied political theory at Duke University as a master’s student and received an M.A. in political science from Duke in 2017.