Erik Freeman, MPhil

Erik Freeman is Director of the Student Success Center and Professor of Philosophy and Religion.He has been teaching at ACM-IAU since Fall 2019. He also taught at the University of Toulon from2021-2023 and is an occasional Visiting Professor at Hanoi’s Thuongmai University (since 2022).Freeman received his BSc in Anthropology from University College London (1999) and his MPhil in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge (2022). He pursued doctoral studies in the Political Science department at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2004-2008), where he was a Presidential Fellow. Freeman has held research fellowships at the University of Bielefeld and the WZB Berlin Social Science Center. He worked briefly in the administrative section of the European Parliament (Luxembourg), and as a manager in the DESC Homeless Shelter in Seattle (2014-2017). Freeman also studied religion at the Vatican’s Pontifical Urban University (2013-2014) and Russian at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations (2017-2018). In addition to his teaching, Freeman has published several literary translations from French and Swedish into English, and occasionally contributes critical articles to literary journals, mainly in South Asia. Heis a fluent speaker of French, English, and Swedish, and has a working knowledge of Russian and a rudimentary understanding of Chinese. His main research interests lie in contemporary political philosophy, translation studies, intersections between philosophy and literature, Chinese philosophy, and Mahayana Buddhism.