Biography

Dr. Anna Irene Baka is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow (2022–2025), jointly appointed at Harvard University and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. She is the Principal Investigator of the EU-funded project The ‘Right’ in Human Rights: Aristotelianism and Neo-Confucianism at the Basis of the EU–China Dialogue. Her research brings together legal philosophy, ethics, and comparative traditions to re-examine the foundations of rights and justice beyond the categories of liberal legalism. Drawing on Aristotelian and Confucian thought, her work seeks to articulate an account of normativity that is grounded in ethical cultivation, historical responsibility, and logical reasoning. She holds a Ph.D. in the Philosophy of Law from the University of Hong Kong (HKU), where she developed a theory of self-determination as a historically situated and dialectical praxis, as well as an LL.M. in International, European, and Comparative Law from the Free University of Brussels and an LL.B. from the University of Athens. Her postgraduate studies were supported by the Hellenic National Scholarship.

Her forthcoming book, Self-Determination Beyond Liberal Legalism: Ethics, Law and the Politics of Justice (Bloomsbury, 2025), offers a critical reconstruction of self-determination that moves beyond procedural and state-centric accounts. Drawing on Aristotelian corrective justice and phenomenological insights, she reframes self-determination as a normative response to deprivation and structural injustice, oriented toward ethical repair and communal accountability. Her second monograph, From Passion to Reason: Aristotle and the Foundations of Rights (Edward Elgar, 2026), turns to Aristotle’s Politics, Metaphysics, Poetics, and Nicomachean Ethics to offer a new foundation for rights—not as abstract individual claims, but as creative instruments shaped by deliberation (phronesis), civic friendship, and the pursuit of the common good. 

Dr. Baka is also co-editor of The Phenomenology of Law and Normativity (Springer, 2024), where her chapter reconsiders the jurist’s role not as a neutral interpreter, but as a moral author whose legal reasoning is shaped by affectivity, social context, and lived experience. She is co-editing the forthcoming volume Foundations of Justice: Chinese and Western Perspectives on Law, Ethics, and Governance, which brings together scholars from both traditions to explore the conditions for a cross-cultural theory of justice and governance. Before entering academia full-time, she worked for seven years as a senior human rights lawyer at the Greek National Commission for Human Rights, where she led institutional responses to the Greek financial and refugee crises, representing the Commission before the Hellenic Parliament, the EU, and the United Nations.

She has taught courses on jurisprudence and the philosophical foundations of human rights at institutions including the University of London International LL.B. Program and Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Her scholarly work has been published by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Springer, and Global Jurist among others, and she has presented her research at Harvard, Peking University, Tsinghua, East China Normal University, the University of Hong Kong, the University of Milan, and the Council of Europe. Dr. Baka is Editor-in-Chief of the China: History and Civilization series (Crete University Press), founding coordinator of the Chinese-Greek Philosophy Forum, and co-founder of the Hellenic Association for Chinese Studies. She also serves on the editorial boards of the Africa Journal of Comparative Constitutional Law and Rivista di Diritto dell’Asia Orientale. Fluent in Greek, English, French, Italian, conversational in Mandarin Chinese, and with working competence in Ancient Greek, Latin, and Classical Chinese—she brings a rare combination of philosophical rigor,  legal expertise and cross-cultural depth to her work. In both her academic and public engagements, she advocates for a more ethically grounded and globally attentive approach to law and politics.