Marking a poignant milestone, APSI recognizes three core faculty retiring in June 2026

At their core, the best institutions are about people. APSI is fortunate to have a cohort of dedicated faculty who have deep expertise in a diverse array of academic disciplines and profound understanding of Asian countries and regions.

With a mix of celebration and sadness, we take this moment to commemorate and reflect on some of the many contributions made to the academy, the university, and APSI by three professors who are retiring from Duke at the end of June 2026.

Anne Allison

Professor Allison came to Duke in 1992, joining the university shortly after it separated the Department of Anthropology’s cultural and biological subdisciplines into distinct departments. Over the ensuing 34 years, Allison would come to be known as one of the preeminent scholars working at the intersection of political economy, daily life, and imagination, particularly in the context of late capitalist, post-industrial Japan. Her oeuvre encompasses the subjects of sexuality, pornography, maternal labor, the globalization of Japanese youth products, the precarity of irregular workers, and death practices in “post-familial” Japan.

In 2025, Allison’s newest publication, Being Dead Otherwise, received the prestigious John Whitney Hall Prize from the Association of Asian Studies, an award which annually recognizes the best English language book about Japan. Published by Duke University Press, the book built on her prior work on the sense of persistent insecurity that took hold among Japanese social consciousness following the economic shocks of the 1990s. This line of inquiry led to discoveries about shifts in conventional funereal practices, which led to questions of whether and how these emerging ways of dealing with death are transforming the ways in which Japanese people also deal with life.

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At her departmental retirement ceremony in April 2026, many of Allison’s former students returned to Duke to share their perspectives and reminisce. The scholars noted how inspirational they found Allison’s particular methods for engaging in ethnography in Japan, remarking on the insights that could be gleaned from her empathic, human-centered approach. Several remarked on her outstanding skills as a mentor who encouraged them to pursue avenues of anthropological inquiry that have led to professional success, even when the pathway seemed unclear.

One of the most recent alumni, Dr. Jieun Cho, now an assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong, provided the following tribute: “Before meeting Anne, I didn’t know that a wonderful teacher, writer, and scholar could be embodied by one person. Over the past decade, she has not only mentored me with academic rigor but also taught me, by example, that joy is hard work—that an intellectual life is something one keeps making happen, with generosity and curiosity, and that we need many kinds of interesting colleagues to do that together. It is rare fortune to know someone like Anne, as a teacher and as a person. I only hope I can pay a little of it forward.”

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Prasenjit Duara

Over the course of his career, Prasenjit Duara’s meticulous research has shaped discussions about the translocal circulation of history and modernity, the paradoxical coexistence of imperial and nationalist histories, and the role of cultural representations in shaping historical consciousness and political imaginaries in East Asia. Most recently, his work in the field of environmental humanities has shown how imperial powers reshaped landscapes and natural resources through infrastructural projects, energy regimes, and resource extraction—a lens which is integral to understanding the political ecology of modern East Asia.

Professor Duara began his teaching career at George Mason University, moving briefly to Stanford University before transitioning to the University of Chicago, where he would spend nearly two decades. In 2008, he was recruited by the National University of Singapore, where he was appointed the Raffles Professor of Humanities and Director of the Asia Research Institute (ARI). He came to Duke as the Oscar Tang Chair of Asian Studies in 2016, leading the Global Asia Initiative and then the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute. From 2019–20, he was the president of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS). His publications have been widely translated into several European languages and also into Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

In August 2025, APSI gathered more than 30 of Professor Duara’s current and former students, blending the intellectual rigor of an academic conference with the collegial air of a multi-generation reunion. The conference highlighted Duara’s profound impact on the fields of history, particularly Asian and Chinese history, transnational studies, and environmental humanities.

Hear his own summation of his career in the conference keynote:

Asked about his colleague, Simon Partner, a fellow professor of history at Duke, shared the following reflection: “I was lucky to be asked to chair the search for the next Oscar Tang Chair of Asian studies. Prasenjit was the ideal candidate – he had a stellar reputation as scholar and administrator; he had more academic citations to his name than the rest of us combined; and his work in Chinese and global history has been seminal for generations of scholars. I was thrilled when he agreed to apply, and even more so that he would come to the history department. Our biggest concern was that he would rest on his laurels, which turned out to be totally unfounded. Prasenjit has been a cornerstone of both APSI and History. He has trained dozens of MA and PhD students, and he is universally admired for his extraordinary erudition, scholarly breadth, and generosity as a colleague and teacher. He’s also an inspiring performer of classical Indian song!”

Proving that faculty never truly leave academia, Professor Duara even has a forthcoming co-edited volume, titled The Hydrosphere of Monsoon Asia: Lives, Histories, Water. The book is scheduled to be published by Cambridge University Press in November 2026.

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Carolyn Kun Shan Lee

Professor Lee joined the faculty at Duke in 1995. In addition to teaching Chinese language from beginner to advanced students, she has been deeply involved in curriculum development and expanding community-engaged learning within Chinese language pedagogy. Her research interests center on content-based instruction (CBI), second language acquisition, experiential learning, sociocultural theory, study abroad education, and intercultural competence. One of her primary contributions to Duke was her institution of a dual-track curriculum designed to accommodate both traditional learners studying Chinese as a foreign language and bilingual heritage learners who already had linguistic and cultural knowledge.

Lee’s publications and academic presentations represent a broad focus on collaborative program design and the development of instructional materials for strengthening cultural knowledge in tandem with enhancing students’ linguistic proficiency. Her pedagogical philosophy can perhaps best be summarized in her own words: “Language isn’t just something we learn, it’s something we live.”

Her commitment to community-engaged and service learning is particularly notable. She established partnerships with local schools and community organizations, blending this engagement into the curriculum so that advanced students are able to utilize their skills in real-world environments, including tutoring elementary students in a dual-language program and discussing classical Chinese philosophy with peers at a nearby magnet high school.

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Lee’s contributions and service to the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Duke are profound and lasting. She served as the Director of the Chinese Language Program at Duke and was the faculty director of the Duke Study in China program, one of the longest-running programs in China administered by an American university, from 2000 to 2022. As one of her colleagues noted, “In many ways, she has not simply been a member of this department, but one of the people—arguably the person—most responsible for making it what it is today.” Lee’s emphasis on intellectual rigor and her high expectations for both students and faculty in the program led to remarkable growth. At the time of her retirement, the Chinese program is the largest in the department, nurtured by Lee’s unique combination of deep care and unwavering insistence on excellence.