Religions and Public Life Speaker Series - Peter van der Veer

Peter van der Veer, Director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity at Göttingen, will be speaking March 26th as part of the Religions and Public Life speaker series. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe. He has just finished a monograph on the comparative study of religion and nationalism in India and China. He taught previously at the Free University in Amsterdam, at Utrecht University and at the University of Pennsylvania. In 1992 he was appointed as Professor of Comparative Religion and Founding Director of the Research Center in Religion and Society in the Social Science Faculty of the University of Amsterdam. He served as Dean of the Social Science Faculty and as Dean of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at Amsterdam, and as Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam and Chairman of the Board of the International Institute for Asian Studies, both in Leiden. In 1994 he was appointed as University Professor at Large at Utrecht University, a position he continues to hold. He has held visiting positions at the London School of Economics, the University of Chicago, University of Michigan, the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the New School in New York, and the National University of Singapore.