Assistant Professor
Kyle Peters is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Japanese Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He received his Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in August 2021 and was awarded a Reischauer Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship at Harvard University for 2022–2023. He specializes in Japanese philosophy, intellectual history, and media studies.
Kyle’s research takes an interdisciplinary approach to Japanese philosophy and intellectual history. It explores how philosophical ideas both connect to their historical moments and remain significant in the contemporary world. His current book manuscript is entitled Kyoto School and Totality: Philosophy, Politics, and Print in Prewar Japan. This work historicizes modern Japan’s most important intellectual movement, the Kyoto School of Philosophy, within broader philosophical and political discussions of “totality” that were circulating through modern print media. His second book project focuses on Nakai Masakazu, an understudied philosopher and media theorist in interwar and postwar Japan.
Education:
Ph.D. East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago (2021)
Contact:
Email： kyleaustinpeters@cuhk.edu.hk
Research Interests:
Japanese Philosophy
Intellectual History
Media Studies
Critical Theory
Select Publications:
“Nakai Masakazu and the Revolutionary Potential of Consumption in 1930s Japan: From Bi-hihyō to the ‘Logic of the Committee’ and Kyoto’s ‘Housing Problem,’” in Positions: Asia Critique 34.3. November 2026 (Forthcoming).
“Watsuji Tetsurō’s ‘Climate’ and its Kyoto School Critics,” in Philosophy East and West 74.4. October 2024.
“Artistic Production and the Making of the Artist: Applying Nishida Kitarō to Discussions of Authorship,” in Philosophy East and West 68.2. April 2018.
“Goddesses and Gods in Rancière and Heidegger: Dialogically Recontextualizing ‘Origin of the Work of Art,’” in Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology (formerly the journal Aesthetic Pathways) 1.2. November 2014.
Website: