Discussion of nationalism in East Asia with Ian Buruma

Ian Buruma, who is visiting Leiden to research a new book, will offer some reflections on nationalism in today’s Japan, China, and South Korea, on current tensions and conflict in the region, and on the way these things fit into China’s, Japan’s, and Korea’s history/ies. His presentation will be followed by Q & A and debate with local Asia scholars.

Co-hosted by IIAS and AMT.

The programme

16.30 Presentation by Ian Buruma
17.00 - 18.00  Q & A and Debate
18.00 - 19.00  Drinks at IIAS 

The speaker

Ian Buruma was educated in Holland and Japan, where he studied history, Chinese literature, and Japanese cinema.

In 1970s Tokyo, he acted in Kara Juro's Jokyo Gekijo and participated in Maro Akaji's butoh dancing company Dairakudakan, followed by a career in documentary filmmaking and photography. In the 1980s, h e worked as a journalist, and spent much of his early writing career travelling and reporting from all over Asia.

Buruma now writes about a broad range of political and cultural subjects for major publications, most frequently for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times,and The Guardian, La Repubblica, NRC Handelsblad.

He was Cultural Editor of The Far Eastern Economic Review, Hong Kong (1983-86) and Foreign Editor of The Spectator, London (1990-91), and has been a Fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg, Berlin, the Woodrow Wilson Center, Washington D.C., St. Antony's College, Oxford, and Remarque Institute, NYU. 

He has delivered lectures at various academic and cultural institutions world-wide, including Oxford, Princeton, and Harvard universities. He is currently Henry R. Luce Professor of Democracy, Human Rights, and Journalism at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

Ian Buruma was awarded the 2008 international  for making "an especially important contribution to culture, society or social science in Europe."

He was voted as one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals by the Foreign Policy/Prospectmagazines in 2008, and in 2010.

Ian Buruma was awarded the 2008 , an annual award which "honors a journalist not only for a distinguished body of work, but also for the particular way that work has helped American readers to understand the complexities of Asia." It is awarded jointly by the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Center in the Freeman Spogli Institute at Stanford University, and the Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics, and Public Policy in the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

His book Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance (Penguin USA) was the winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Prize for the Best Current Interest Book.

In April 2012 Ian Buruma was awarded the Abraham Kuyper Prize at the Princeton Theological Seminary.

Registration

Fully booked. Registration is no longer possible.  

There is a great interest in the debate and the maximum capacity of our IIAS conference room has been reached.

If you have a confirmed registration, we kindly ask you to come on time; the lecture will start at 16.30.
Please let us know as soon as possible if you are unable to attend so that we can give your seat to someone who is on the waiting list.