Michael Dufresne

Michael Dufresne joined USF as a Kiriyama Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Asia Pacific Studies after completing his PhD at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Besides coordinating the Asia Bridge Graduate Fellowship Program, he also teaches in USF’s Department of Philosophy. His research specializations include Chinese philosophy, comparative philosophy, aesthetics and decolonial philosophy. He is also interested in philosophy of education and alternative epistemologies. 

Michael is currently working on a book that examines the philosophical and aesthetic views of the late Qing/early Republican scholar Wang Guowei 王國維 (1877–1927) through the lens of (de)coloniality. He is also translating and compiling a collection of Wang Guowei’s most significant essays on philosophy and aesthetics. Additionally, he is writing an essay on the “epistemology of praxis” and the innate value of doing, which is set to be published in The Routledge Handbook of Comparative Epistemology in 2026.

• Pre-Qin philosophy
• German aesthetics
• Decoloniality
• Poetics
• Late Qing/Early Republican China

• Chinese philosophy
• Comparative philosophy
• Aesthetics
• Decolonial philosophy

• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, PhD in Philosophy, 2024
• University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, MA in Philosophy, 2016
• University of North Florida, BA in Philosophy, 2014

• Journal Editor, University of Hawaiʻi Press
• Graduate Instructor in Philosophy, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

• Dufresne, Michael. (Forthcoming 2025). “Art as Consolation: On Wang Guowei’s Theory of Addiction.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education.
• Dufresne, Michael and Pavel Stankov, eds. (2023). Comparative Reflections on Persons and Selves. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.
• Dufresne, Michael. (2017). “The Illusion of Teaching and Learning: Zhuangzi, Wittgenstein, and the Groundlessness of Language.” Education Philosophy and Theory 49, no. 12: 1207–15. (Reprinted in Cultivation of Self in East Asian Philosophy of Education, edited by Ruyu Hung, 39–47. New York: Routledge, 2020. ISBN: 978-0-367-35934-8.)