Ryoa Chung is an Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Université de Montréal. She was a visiting doctoral student at the École Normale Supérieure de Fontenay/St-Cloud (Paris, 1997), and completed her PhD in Philosophy at the Université de Montréal (2001) under the supervision of Daniel M. Weinstock. She was a visiting scholar at Columbia University (2002) and the Harvard School of Public Health (2003). She received an award for Teaching Excellence in 2005 (Prix d'excellence enenseignement de la FAS 2005 - secteur lettres et sciences humaines).  

Her fields of research are ethics in international relations and applied political philosophy, particularly in the field of global health. She is also interested in feminist perspectives in the field of international ethics. With a group of colleagues, she co-founded the Réseau de perspectives féministes à Université de Montréal and contributed to the creation of the undergraduate program « mineure en études féministes, des genres et des sexualités » (2017).

She published in such journals as Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, Public Health Ethics, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Revue internationale de sociologie, and Medicine, Conflict and Survival (2017) and in collective works including Questions d'éthique contemporaine (L. Thiaw-Po-Une, ed., Stock, 2006) and Bioethics in Canada (C. Weijer, A. Skelton and S. Brennan, eds, Oxford University Press, 2013). Chung is the author of the entries ‘Injustices épistémiques’ and ‘Inégalités de santé’ in Dictionnaire des inégalités et de justice sociale (P. Savidan, ed., Presses universitaires de France, 2018). She is also the author of the 'Soft Power' and 'Domination' entries in the Global Justice Encyclopedia (D. Chatterjee, ed., Springer, 2012).

With Matthew R. Hunt, she co-wrote the chapter ‘Justice and Health Inequalities in Humanitarian Crises: Structured Health Vulnerabilities’ and 'Natural Disasters in Health Inequalities and Global Justice' (P. T. Lenard and C. Straehle co-eds, Edinburgh University Press, 2012). She published papers with co-authors L. Eckenwiler and C. Straehle in Bioethics, and with co-authors M. Johri, A. Dawson, T. Schrecker in Globalization and Health. She also published in collaboration with Hunt, Durocher, Henrys, Rochon in Journal of Medical Ethics (2017), Journal of Human Rights Practice(2016). With Jean-Baptiste Jeangène Vilmer, she co-edited the book Éthique des relations internationales (Presses universitaires de France, 2013).  Other accepted publications forthcoming in 2019-2020.

Since 2017, she is a monthly columnist for the radio show « Les Éclaireurs » on Radio-Canada Première and discusses social issues from public ethics perspective. Chung presented academic talks in Canada, United States, Haïti, France, Germany, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Cameroun, India, Danemark.

She is currently working on the critical relation between structural injustice and epistemic injustice in order to examine the production and perpetuation of health inequalities. She is also working on the notion of « structural health vulnerability » (developped with M. Hunt, McGill) in the case of refugees health. She is a member of an international research team funded by the Wellcome Trust (2018-2019). Her work is published both in English and in French and was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (research team grant 2011-2016), and is currently funded by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight Development grant (PI, research team grant, 2018-2020), and by the Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Insight grant (individual grant 2018-2022).

My research interests have mainly to do with ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of law. I am focusing on contemporary theories of justice and democracy, both the justification of fundamental rights and the institutional mechanisms for enforcing them. I am interested in political liberalism and its multiculturalist implications, the issue of public reason and deliberation, and in constitutionalism and legal argumentation.

As part of the Chair's activities, I am conducting a research program on institutions of tolerance with a political dimension that also applies to moral psychology and the philosophy of education. In 2011-2012, I also began studying the issue of corruption in and of democracy. Since 2012, I have been co-ordinating the CORDÉ Corruption et démocratie research group.

My research is divided into 2 main categories: contemporary political philosophy and the history of political ideas from the Renaissance to the 19^th century. These 2 categories also reflect the content of my courses and seminars.

In contemporary political philosophy, my work deals with questions of post-war transitional justice (rebuilding institutions, penal justice, truth and reconciliation commissions, collective memory, etc.), where my main theoretical interests are the issues of collective responsibility and democratic deliberation. Generally speaking, my research - both on social justice and democracy issues and on immigration - is in line with work on neo-republicanism. In moral philosophy, I take a consequentialist approach.

My publications on the history of ideas deal with relations between political freedom and authority, from the 15^th to the 19^th centuries, more specifically on the republican tradition since the Renaissance. In that connection, I have focused particularly on the work of Machiavelli, Jean Bodin, Hobbes and Rousseau.