Navigating Circulatory Currents: A Personal Journey (keynote address)
Prasenjit Duara, Oscar L. Tang Family Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies
This talk is the keynote address for an interdisciplinary conference: Global China: Circulatory Currents in History and Culture, held at Duke University from August 29–30, 2025.
The conference takes stock of the immense impact Prasenjit Duara's scholarship has had in the fields of history, Asian Studies, and transnational studies. It is being supported by the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute and Department of History at Duke University.
Some of the recurring themes in Prasenjit’s oeuvre include: nationalism, state-building, religion, environmentalism, transnationalism, imperialism, Asian traditions, and revolution.
The topics of the conference are by no means limited to these themes; organized panels will touch on global and planetary implications from China Studies, science and the logics of revolution and reform, borderlands, governing resources and people, Sinospheres, and figural representations of the past and the future.
About the speaker:
Prasenjit Duara, Oscar L. Tang Family Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies at Duke University, was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously professor and chair of the history department at the University of Chicago (1991–2008) and chaired the committee on Chinese Studies. He then became the Raffles Professor of Humanities and directed the Asia Research Institute at the National University of Singapore (2008–2015). In 1988, he published his first book: Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900–1942 (Stanford University Press).
Culture, Power and the State won the American Historical Association’s Fairbank Prize and the Association for Asian Studies’ Levenson Prize.
Other influential books include: Rescuing History from the Nation (University of Chicago, 1995); Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Rowman, 2003); and, most recently, The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (Cambridge, 2014).
He has edited Decolonization: Now and Then (Routledge, 2004) and co-edited A Companion to Global Historical Thought with Viren Murthy and Andrew Sartori (John Wiley, 2014). His work has been widely translated into multiple European and Asian languages.