Gray Kochhar-Lindgren has served as Director of the Common Core since June 2014. Prior to joining HKU, he served as Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences, the inaugural Director of the First Year and Pre-Major Programmes, and the inaugural Associate Vice-Chancellor for Undergraduate Learning at the University of Washington Bothell (just outside Seattle). He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies from Emory University. In 2009–10, he served as a Fulbright Scholar in Hong Kong, where he taught The Postmodern City for Comparative Literature and Kant’s Critiques for the Department of Philosophy, and worked with six other Fulbright colleagues as a consultant on Hong Kong’s 2012 curricular reform.
In 2019, Professor Kochhar-Lindgren served as Lead for Transdisciplinarity-in-Action, which won the Outstanding Teaching Award (Team) from both HKU and the University Grants Committee (UGC). Team members included Gina Marchetti (Comparative Literature and Film Studies), Xiao Hu (Digital Cultural Heritage and Social Data Science), Julian Tanner (Chemical Biology and Nucleic Acid Nanotechnology), and Mathew Pryor (Landscape Architecture, Ecology, and Sustainable Development Practices). Since 2016, he has co-facilitated, with Rick Dolphijn of Utrecht University—an Honorary Professor in Comparative Literature at HKU—the More-Than-Human City undergraduate exchange. In 2017, he founded GLADE (Global Liberal Arts Design Experiments), an international consortium of holistic, cross-disciplinary programmes. Since 2020, he has directed both the Transdisciplinary Undergraduate Research Initiative and Critical Zones: Gender, Cities, and Well-Being, a project funded by a UGC Teaching Award.
Professor Kochhar-Lindgren is a Principal Fellow of Advance HE (London), a Fellow of the Hong Kong Teaching Excellence Alliance (HKTEA), and a Fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Notre Dame’s Philosophy as a Way of Life Network. He also serves on the Board of Directors of Folded Paper Dance & Theatre (Hong Kong) and sits on a number of international advisory and editorial boards.
Professor Kochhar-Lindgren’s most recent book is Urban Arabesques: Philosophy, Hong Kong, Transversality (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2020), and he is currently completing Pintxos: Small Delicacies & Chance Encounters. His recent articles include “I Hate Philosophy,” “Scintillant@the University of Angelic Invention,” and (with Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren) “Wild Studios: Art, Philosophy, and the Transversal University.”
