New Civilizationisms in Asia
Dominic Sachsenmeier (University of Göttingen); Prasenjit Duara (Duke); Cemil Aydin (UNC—Chapel Hill); Jie-Hyun Lim (Williams)
The New Civilizationisms in Asia roundtable is part of a larger international collaboration organized by Stanford University and the University of Gottingen.
In the past two decades, there has been a world-wide resurgence of discourses that define the people in terms of their unique civilizational identity and call for states to refurbish their timeless civilizational glory. These discourses, or “new civilizationisms” as we call them, both draw on and react against an older, Enlightenment-inspired, and Eurocentric notion of civilization.
Our international research network is mapping the overlapping ecosystems of new civilizationism. We ask: How has talking about civilization instead of nation made authoritarian populism respectable again? Who are the originators of new civilizationisms and what political and intellectual resources do they draw on? How have civilizationist ideas ricocheted across the globe through new media technologies and platforms?
At Duke, the speakers will present four lectures addressing the various themes of the forthcoming multi-volume publication.
This event is organized by APSI with support from the Duke University Department of History.
About the speakers:
Dominic Sachsenmeier
Dominic Sachsenmaier holds a chair professorship in “Modern China with a Special Emphasis on Global Historical Perspectives.” Sachsenmaier’s current research interests include China’s transnational and global connections in the past and present. He has published in fields such as Chinese concepts of society, the global contexts of European history and multiple modernities. In addition to his academic publications, Sachsenmaier has also written for newspapers ranging from Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung to the Singapore Straits Times. Moreover, he has delivered a wide range of talks and keynote speeches, both in academic settings as well as at other institutions.
Sachsenmaier serves on several editorial and advisory boards in Asia, Europe and the United States; he is one of the three editors of the book series Columbia Studies in International and Global History (Columbia UP). From 2014 to 2022, he served as the president of the US-based Toynbee Prize Foundation (where he continues being a board member). He is an elected member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Lower Saxony.
Prasenjit Duara
Prasenjit Duara is the Oscar Tang Chair of East Asian Studies at Duke University and director of the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute. He was born and educated in India and received his PhD in Chinese history from Harvard University. He was previously Professor and Chair of the Department of History and Chair of the Committee on Chinese Studies at the University of Chicago (1991-2008). Subsequently, he became Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director, Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore (2008-2015).
In 1988, he published Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford Univ Press) which won the Fairbank Prize of the AHA and the Levenson Prize of the AAS, USA. Among his other books are Rescuing History from the Nation (U 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 Chinese, Japanese, Korean and the European languages.
Cemil Aydin
Cemil Aydin is a professor of international and global history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He studied at Boğaziçi University, İstanbul University, and the University of Tokyo before receiving his Ph.D. degree at Harvard University in 2002.
Aydin’s publications include Politics of Anti-Westernism in Asia (Columbia University Press, 2007) and The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History (Harvard University Press, Spring 2017). His writings on the political history of the world in the long 19th century were published by Harvard University Press in 2018 as part of an edited volume An Emerging Modern World: 1750–1870. He currently serves as the co-editor of Columbia University Press’s book series on International and Global History.
Jie-Hyun Lim
Jie-Hyun Lim is a South Korean historian, writer, and “memory activist.” He is the CIPSH chair holder of “Global Easts,” Distinguished Professor, and founder of the Critical Global Studies Institute (CGSI) at Sogang University, Seoul. Since 2025, he has been the Class of 1955 Visiting Professor of International Studies at Williams College. His areas of expertise include global history and memory with a focus on Eastern Europe and East Asia, Polish modern and contemporary history, history of historiography, and Marxism and nationalism.
He has served as principal investigator of the research project Mnemonic Solidarity: Colonialism, War and Genocide in the Global Memory Space (2017-2024) and series editor of three edited volumes: “Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century” and “Entangled Memories in the Global South” at Palgrave/Macmillan, and “Global Easts” at the Central European University Press. Recent books include Victimhood Nationalism: History and Memory in a Global Age (Columbia Univ. Press, 2025); Global Easts: Remembering, Imagining, Practicing (Columbia Univ. Press, 2022); Mnemonic Solidarity-Global Interventions, co-edited with Eve Rosenhaft (Palgrave, 2021); and The Palgrave Handbook of Mass Dictatorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), co-edited with Paul Corner.