Duke University Asian/Pacific Studies Institute & Department of History

The New Civilizationisms in Asia roundtable is part of a larger international collaboration organized by Stanford University and the University of Göttingen.  At Duke, the speakers will present four lectures addressing the various themes of the forthcoming multi-volume publication.

 

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?

 

 

About the speakers:

 

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.

 

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).

 

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 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.