HCMC – ‘Encounter’ Presents Professor Prasenjit Duara

Wed 26 Feb 2014, 6.30 – 8.30 pm
Room C103
HCMC University of Social Sciences and Humanities

From the organizer:

‘ENCOUNTER’ talk series welcomes Professor Prasenjit Duara, Director of Asia Research Institute; Director of Research in Humanities & Social Sciences, NUS, Singapore with a public lecture on Wednesday 26 February 2014.

Asia as Network: Future of the Past

Historically this region known as Asia had no strict boundaries, it was densely interconnected by trade and religion, evidenced in cultural practice (their rituals, arts and crafts). These informal networks had profound implications on the relationship between culture and society across this region. Today, there is an emerging consensus that continuing our pursuit of existing modes of production, consumption and the political economic arrangements that underpin them will endanger planetary sustainability sooner than we realize. Professor Duara will demonstrate how the intersection of differing cultural ideas can provide an alternate framework to rethinking the future of this regions’ cultural cosmopolitanism.

The event is free of charge; English and Vietnamese translation will be provided

Seats inside the auditorium are limited. Please arrange to come early for the best available position.

Prof. Prasenjit Duara is the Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute as well as Director of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences at National University of Singapore. He is a historian of China and more broadly of Asia in the twentieth century. Duara also writes on historical thought and historiography. Previously he was Professor and Chair of the Department of History and of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago. In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford University Press), which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Duara has spoken as a keynote lecturer or distinguished speaker at over 75 institutions around the world since 1996.