Anna Eirini BAKA

Anna Eirini (Irene) Baka is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Heritage at Ca' Foscari University of Venice and Associate at the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) - East Asian Languages and Civilizations Department of Harvard.

Her project entitled “The ‘right’ in human rights: Aristotelianism and Neo-Confucianism at the basis of the EU-China Dialogue” (RIGHT), which has been awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship under Horizon-2020, is an interdisciplinary research project aiming to provide a definitional human rights framework on the basis of Aristotelianism and Neo-Confucianism, thus filling a major gap in human rights theory and practice and offering a basis for the sustainable continuation of the EU-China Human Rights Dialogue.

Dr. Anna Irene Baka is also a licensed Greek jurist, formerly Senior Legal Associate at the Greek National Commission for Human Rights, the independent advisory body to the Greek state on human rights' issues established and functioning in accordance with the UN Paris Principles, and former postdoctoral fellow at the Philosophy Department of the University of Crete, Greece. Her research in Crete focused on the idea of normativity and the philosophy of legal rights from the scope of Edmund Husserl's eidetic and transcendental Phenomenology, as well as Adolph Reinach’s work on the a priori elements of civil law. She has also served as adjunct lecturer of Jurisprudence, EU Law and Human Rights at the University of London International LL.B. Programme in Greece.

Dr. Baka has completed her undergraduate and postgraduate studies in Athens, Greece (LL.B. and LL.M. summa cum laude in Public Law and European Integration), Brussels, Belgium (LL.M. magna cum laude in International, European and Comparative Law) and has significant professional and academic experience in Europe and Asia. She holds a Ph.D. in international law and legal philosophy from the University of Hong Kong, for which she was awarded a scholarship by the University of Hong Kong as well as the Hellenic National Scholarship. She has worked for the European Commission, and has advised the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Hellenic Parliament among others. She has participated in numerous international research projects and conducted original archival research on Cyprus, the Greek Civil War, the 1883-1885 Sino-French War in Vietnam and the South China Sea Maritime Dispute.

Dr. Baka has a keen interest in comparative law, the philosophy of law, the history of legal ideas, as well as interdisciplinary approaches to law, most prominently law and informal logic, law and syllogistic logic (Aristotle), law and hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur), law and semantics (Ludwig Wittgenstein), law and political philosophy, the formation of collective identities in relation to law, the self-determination of peoples, as well as the history, theory and philosophy of law and human rights, particularly from the scope of continental philosophy: Aristotle, transcendental-Husserlian and social phenomenology (Scheler, Schutz), Freudian and Rankian psychoanalysis, as well as Eastern philosophies, particularly Daoism, Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism (Zhu Xi’s and Wang Yangming’s approaches). She maintains a special interest in the Chinese ideology and take of international law, from the Opium wars to date.