Academics often describe conferences as a mixed bag of experiences. At their best, they represent an opportunity to meet emerging scholars as well as old friends and to see what new ideas are in development within the broader community. Reunions, on the other hand, tend to have a slightly wilder reputation.
In August 2025, more than 30 former students of Prasenjit Duara, the Oscar L. Tang Family Distinguished Professor of East Asian Studies at Duke University, gathered for a unique conference with reunion-esque elements. The event, nearly six years in the making, was partly a celebration of Professor Duara’s 75th birthday. Primarily, though, the conference served to recognize the profound impact his scholarship has had on the fields of history, Asian Studies, and transnational studies. Over the course of his academic life, Duara’s research has critically examined the complex entanglements of sovereignty, imperialism, and modernity in East Asia. His scholarship emphasizes the contingent and uneven nature of sovereignty, exploring how it was constructed, contested, and negotiated across imperial and nationalist projects in a variety of cultural contexts.
Duara’s work advances the concept of circulatory history, highlighting the transnational flows of ideas, culture, and political practices that shaped East Asian modernities, particularly in China. This influenced the underlying theme of the conference, “Global China: Circulatory Currents in History and Culture.” His scholarship also reflects the ways in which historical narratives are mobilized to negotiate contemporary political anxieties and cultural identities. His numerous publications highlight the ways in which colonial legacies in Asia have intertwined with national development policies and identity formation of the nation as a whole as well as intranational movements. Most recently, his research interests broadened to include environmental history and the material dimensions of empire, such as infrastructure and energy, further situating East Asian modernity within global ecological and economic frameworks.
Over the course of two days, representing multiple generations and academic disciplines, Duara’s current and former students shared presentations based on their own projects, tracing a complex, multilayered narrative of the region’s 20th-century transformations. Showcasing what they learned in the presence of their mentor and friend, the speakers positioned themselves as Professor Duara’s living legacy. Across six panels, these scholars of modern East Asian literature, history, and culture epitomized his resonant concept of circulatory history, showcasing how his translocal interrogation of the past continues to inspire new perspectives on sovereignty, empire, nationalism, and cultural production. By using the lens of circulatory history, presenters transcended traditional nation-state narratives, allowing a richer interrogation of modernity as both a shared and uneven experience.
The first panel, Global Regimes and 20th–century China, examined the complex relationships between economic development, culture, nature, and environmental crises in China and beyond. Together, the presentations explored how domestic as well as global pressures, colonial powers, nationalist movements, and emergent postcolonial states negotiated (and renegotiated) authority, legitimacy, and territoriality. From the distinct disciplinary approaches of the panelists, a rich array of themes emerged that speak directly to questions of sovereignty, the global entanglement of modern China, labor and statecraft, and the interplay of local and planetary systems.
The second panel, exploring China’s borderlands, situated Asia among broader regional and global networks, demonstrating the ways through which capital, labor, and commodities circulated through imperial and transnational systems. By analyzing economic structures, industrial regimes, and colonial trade relations, the panel reflected Duara’s insight that modernity and capitalism cannot be understood in isolation. There are multiple and complex entanglements of economic development and imperial power among the nations bordering China; modernity in the region must be understood in the context of interconnected regional as well as global processes. Through their presentations, the panelists showed how these concepts reflect a legacy of imperial and colonial histories originating both within the region as well as external sources.
PhD candidate Yaming You (History, Duke University), a current student of Professor Duara, presents her research on the Chinese Communist Party’s wartime medical policies in the 1940s during a panel on science, industry, and the logics of reform.
The third panel addressed questions related to science, industry, and the logics of reform in both imperial and modern China, focusing on how knowledge production and political agendas co-evolved. It highlighted the ways in which scientific authority and industrial policy were mobilized to negotiate between traditional and modern understanding of medical practice, legitimize political power, and guide national development. Collectively, the scholars on this panel explored the complex logics behind China’s ongoing reforms in science and industry, illustrating the interdependent relationships between culture, politics, and knowledge.
Panel four was perhaps the most wide-ranging and philosophical of the entire conference in terms of the scholarly backgrounds and approaches taken by the panelists. Exploring the global and planetary implications from China studies meant examining China’s role and implications within and among broad contexts using diverse intellectual, philosophical, and historical lenses. The panelists addressed the affective basis for an ethics of interspecies coexistence, contextualizing and interpreting German idealism to a Chinese audience, the phenomenon of photobooks as an aesthetic form for picturing together human perception and geological time and force, and a re-examination of China’s Cultural Revolution as an open-ended sequence of ruptures and unintended consequences.
The penultimate panel, on circulatory histories, explored the movement and exchange of ideas, cultures, and political aspirations across Asian spaces, focusing on how history circulates and transforms through different regions and contexts, particularly in the Sinosphere. Speakers placed the historical movement of ideas, peoples, and political projects within transregional and transnational frameworks. Topics included the spiritual and material significance of Mecca for Chinese Muslims, Tibet’s political history framed through global Cold War and decolonization contexts, reformist and feminist responses to colonial marriage laws among Chinese communities in Southeast Asia, and new theoretical approaches to Chinese literary studies through circulatory history. Together, these papers challenged linear and national narratives by highlighting dynamic, overlapping, and multi-sited histories.
The final panel, examining figural representations of the past and future, engaged deeply with Duara’s notions of circulatory history and East Asian modernity by examining how historical narratives, cultural productions, and symbolic portrayals circulate across temporal, spatial, and ideological boundaries in East Asia and beyond. With illustrative examples from diverse media and historical records, ranging from official government documents to comics, film, and historical mythologies, the panel advanced a comparative and interdisciplinary understanding of how pasts and futures across Asia are figuratively constructed and contested within the legacies of colonialism, empire, and Cold War geopolitics.
The highlight of the conference came at the end, with Prasenjit Duara’s own keynote address delivered to a capacity audience. Part humorous personal reflection, part synthesis of a lifetime of scholarship, his talk was a prime example of the ways in which his interdisciplinary work has illuminated the larger issues affecting human beings around the world. His final slide, warmly received by the audience, depicted a visual representation of an “epistemic engine” capturing the historical, geographical, and political structures that both constrain and enable human action.
Ultimately, this conference reaffirmed that understanding China’s and East Asia’s past, and being prepared for their future, requires embracing complexity and contradiction. By spanning the social sciences as well as visual culture and historical imagination, the conference panelists revealed a nuanced perspective of a world shaped by flows of people, ideas, and power. Prasenjit Duara’s scholarship continues to provide an essential compass for navigating these circulatory concepts, encouraging scholars to think beyond borders and to engage with the dynamic, layered histories that have shaped modern Asia.
