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Scholar to lecture on rise of China, India

By Sarah Meyer '08
April 14, 2008

To celebrate St. Olaf College's newly revised Asian Conversations Program, University of Chicago Professor Prasenjit Duara will give a lecture on campus April 16 titled "Visions of History, Trajectories of Power: China and India since De-colonization."

DuaraPrasenjit
Duara
The lecture will begin at 7 p.m. on Wednesday in Rolvaag Memorial Library Room 525. It is free and open to the public.

Asian Conversations, which was founded a decade ago, offers a chance for St. Olaf students to explore the culture, history, language and societies of East Asia while earning multiple General Education credits. Beginning with the Class of 2011, Asian Conversations will be offered as a sophomore-year option. The change will enable the program to integrate more language into the courses than was possible when most participants were freshmen. The revised program also features all new classes.

"We've enjoyed one decade of good classes and students coming together to take a sequence of classes leading up to a month's study together in China and Japan. We're thrilled to be headed into a second decade of the program, with all new classes," says Program Director and Assistant Professor of Asian Studies and Political Science Kathy Tegtmeyer Pak. "Since we'll be a sophomore-year program now, we're going to be able to do more work with the Chinese and Japanese languages during the non-language classes. We've got a new theme, a journey, which lets us consider how people and ideas and things have moved throughout Asia over time."

Duara is a professor of history and East Asian languages and civilizations at the University of Chicago. His research interests include the social and cultural history of China as well as issues such as nationalism, imperialism, transnationalism, and decolonization.

"He's a creative scholar whose research stretches across East Asia, using diverse materials and methods," Tegtmeyer Pak says. "We admire his interdisciplinary approach to Asian studies and think he sets a good example for us to strive for in our own teaching. Our students tell us they want to learn more about India, and of course the news is full of stories about the rise of both India and China, so we're grateful for this opportunity to hear about these two rising powers in historical comparison from a leading scholar."

This lecture is sponsored by the Robert Leraas Interdisciplinary Lecture Series, along with the Faculties of Fine Arts, Interdisciplinary and General Studies, and the Social Sciences as well as the Political Awareness and Diversity Awareness Committees.

Contact Kari VanDerVeen at 507-786-3970 or vanderve@stolaf.edu.