Professor Prasenjit Duara is Director of Research in Humanities and Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore, and Professor Emeritus of History and East Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books on Chinese and East Asian history including Culture, Power and the State: Rural North China, 1900 – 1942 (1988), which won the Fairbank Prize of the American Historical Association and the Levenson Prize of the Association for Asian Studies.