Professor Prasenjit Duara

Home Institution: National University of Singapore

Visiting Period: 21 April - 20 May 2013

Research Project: Transcendence in a Secular World: Global Modernity and the non-Abrahamic Traditions of Asia

Research Seminar: Date TBA

Professor Duara will present some ways of thinking of engaging the connected and comparative study of China and India and Asia more broadly to the new institutes of Chinese and South Asian Studies at Victoria University of Wellington. He will also be completing his book manuscript entitled Transcendence in a Secular World: Global Modernity and the non-Abrahamic Traditions of Asia. It is a work of historical sociology or ‘big history’ which explores various Asian social and cultural responses –actual and potential--to global problems of modernity.

Prasenjit Duara is a historian of China and more broadly of Asia in the twentieth century. He also writes on historical thought and historiography. Duara was professor and chairman of the History department at the University of Chicago. Since 2008 he has been at NUS where he is Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director of Asia Research Institute and of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences. Duara has spoken as a keynote lecturer or distinguished speaker at over 60 institutions around the world since 1996.

Among his books are Rescuing History from the Nation (1995), Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (2003), an edited volume on Decolonization (Routledge, 2004), and Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (1988), which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS. His most recent work is The Global and the Regional in China’s Nation-Formation, (Routledge 2009). His work has been widely translated into Chinese, Japanese and Korean.