Prof. Dr. Peter van der Veer

 
From 2009 until 2021 Peter van der Veer was the Director of the Department for the Study of Religious Diversity. He has taught anthropology 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 the Dean of the Social Science Faculty, the Dean of the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at Amsterdam, and the Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam and the Chairman of the Board of the International Institute for Asian Studies, both in Leiden. In 2004, he was appointed as University Professor at Large at Utrecht University, a position from which he retired in 2019. He has held visiting positions at the LSE, the University of Chicago, the University of Michigan, the EHESS in Paris, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the New School in New York, and the National University of Singapore. Most recently, he served as the Provost’s Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Chicago, where he delivered the 2019 Annual Vivekananda Lecture. He also received the Hendrik Muller Award for his social science study of religion. He is an elected Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Van der Veer works on religion and nationalism in Asia and Europe. Among his major publications are “Gods on Earth” (LSE Monographs, 1988), “Religious Nationalism” (University of California Press, 1994), “Imperial Encounters” (Princeton University Press, 2001), “The Modern Spirit of Asia. The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India” (Princeton University Press, 2013), and “The Value of Comparison” (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures, Duke University Press 2016). (Routledge 2017).
 

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