People

Prasenjit Duara Oscar L. Tang Family Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies, History; Director, Asian/Pacific Studies Institute (PhD: Harvard University)

Prasenjit Duara 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.

He has a strong interest in environmental humanities and has organized a conference on environmental justice and sustainable citizenship in Asia, as well as workshops on the hydrologic cycle and historical societies, rivers and historical time, rivers in the Anthropocene, the management of water power in post-war East Asia, and trans-species listening and the rights of nature.

Jieun Cho Postdoctoral Associate, APSI (PhD: Duke University)

Jieun Cho is a cultural anthropologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Asian/Pacific Studies Institute at Duke University. She earned her Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Duke University, specializing in gender, environment, and health. Her research (“Anxious Care: Radioactive Uncertainty and the Politics of Life in Post-Nuclear Japan”) investigates how middle-class families navigate the challenges of raising healthy children amidst the uncertainties of radiation risk in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan.

Various stages of her dissertation research have been funded by the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Science Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, and the Graduate School at Duke University. Since 2021, she has also been a Contributing Editor of the Society for East Asian Anthropology section at Anthropology News.

As a postdoctoral researcher, she seeks to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on social reproduction, toxic ecologies, and environmental futures from the perspective of post-Cold War East Asia. Her research interests include: feminist care ethics, precarity and affect, gender and nation, anthropology of senses, place-making, disaster and crisis, and the Anthropocene.

Jackson Ewing Adjunct Associate Professor in the Division of Environmental Sciences and Policy (PhD: Bond University)

Jackson Ewing holds a joint appointment as a senior fellow at Duke University’s Nicholas Institute of Environmental Policy Solutions and an adjunct associate professor at the Sanford School of Public Policy. He works closely with the Duke Kunshan University Environmental Research Center and International Masters of Environmental Policy programs to build policy research collaboration across Duke platforms in the United States and China. Prior to joining Duke, Ewing was director of Asian Sustainability at the Asia Society Policy Institute in New York, where he led projects on Asian carbon market cooperation and sustainable resource development in the ASEAN Economic Community.

He previously served as a MacArthur Fellow and head of the Environment, Climate Change and Food Security Program at Singapore’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and has worked throughout Asia with actors in government, the private sector, civil society, and international organizations. Ewing publishes widely through a range of mediums and is a regular contributor to radio, television and print media. He holds a doctorate in environmental security and master’s degree in international relations from Australia’s Bond University, and a bachelor’s degree in political science from the College of Charleston.

Ralph Litzinger Associate Professor of Cultural Anthropology (PhD: University of Washington)

Ralph Litzinger’s early research focused on ethnicity, nationalism, and post-socialism in China. He has published articles on nationality theory in China, memory work, and ethnic politics in the post-Cold War global order, on gender and film, photography, and popular culture. Other Chinas: the Yao and the Politics of National Belonging (Duke University Press, 2000) was the first major ethnographic study to examine the work and writing of minority intellectuals in the imagining of post-socialist futures.

More recently, his research has focused on activism and advocacy work around the environment, labor, migrant education. He published essays on the transnational and media dimensions of anti-dam protest in southwest China; on global environmental NGOs and the privatization of nature; on self-immolation among Tibetans; on transnational activism directed at Apple and the companies that source its supply chain; and on the emerging field of global media ecologies.

Edmund Malesky Professor of Policital Science; Director, Duke Center for International Development (PhD: Duke University)

Edmund (Eddy) Malesky is a specialist on Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam. Currently, Malesky’s research agenda is very much at the intersection of Comparative and International Political Economy, falling into three major categories: 1) Authoritarian political institutions and their consequences; 2) The political influence of foreign direct investment and multinational corporations; and 3) Political institutions, private business development, and formalization.

His research projects on environmental governance include “Boycotts or Bureaucracy: Who Has the Power to Make Vietnam Greener?” and “Can an Accountability App Solve the Waste Crisis in Cambodia?”

Margaret McKean Research Professor of Environmental Science and Policy, Nicholas School of the Environment (PhD: University of California, Berkeley)

Professor McKean studies political institutions, particularly electoral arrangements and property rights, and is interested in applying theories of cooperation to the management of common-pool goods like environmental resources. Her other work on the commons has examined traditional arrangements used in Japan to foster cooperation in limiting use to sustainable levels.

Beyond Japan, she is interested in diagnosing not just how but also why people use joint arrangements to manage collective goods, and in extracting lessons from the existing repertoire of experience with environmental cooperation and common-property regimes to inform efforts to address common-pool resource problems in contemporary settings, on more complex collective goods, and at larger scales.

She was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Common Property from 1982 to 1987 where she helped to organize the Annapolis conference on Common Property (1985) and to build the initial Common Property network. Along with Elinor Ostrom, Fikret Berkes, David Feeny, and others, McKean co-founded the International Association for the Study of Common Property in 1989. She organized the first global meeting of the IASCP at Duke in 1990 as well as the recent global conference of IASC held on the Mount Fuji commons in Japan in 2013. She also served as fifth president of the IASCP (1995-1996).

She is currently working on three book-length manuscripts: Cooperation on the Japanese Commons; The Common Good in Uncommonly Bad Times: Japan’s Experience with Collective Choice under Scarcity; and Property Rights for a Small Planet. She is also involved with European and Japanese colleagues in several collaborative projects.

Junjie Zhang Associate Professor of Environmental Economics; Director, Environmental Research Center and International Master of Environmental Policy (iMEP) Program (PhD: Duke University)

Junjie Zhang is a professor in the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and Director of the Initiative for Sustainable Investment at Duke Kunshan University. He founded and directed Duke Kunshan’s Environmental Research Center and International Master of Environmental Policy Program. Before that, he was an associate professor in the School of Global Policy and Strategy at the University of California, San Diego. He was also a Volkswagen Visiting Chair in Sustainability in Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University.

His recent research focuses on empirical issues in energy transition, climate change, and green finance. He has received funding from reputable sources, including the U.S. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, China National Natural Science Foundation, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment, China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development, the Energy Foundation, the World Bank, and Asian Development Bank. He holds a B.S. from the Renmin University of China, a B.S. and an M.S. from Tsinghua University, and a Ph.D. from Duke University.