Maurizio Peleggi
Columbia University, Italian Academy, Weinberg Fellow in Architectural History & Preservation, Spring Semester 2019
I study visual and material culture through the conceptual and methodological lenses of cultural history, art history, anthropology and cultural theory. My research focuses on the history of Thai material culture, in particular objects of cultural memory, heritage politics, and the history of local archaeology and museology. I have also theorised the notions of colonial nostalgia and (in recent papers and a forthcoming book from the University of Chicago Press) devotional conservation.
A full professor at the National University of Singapore since 2017, I have held visiting positions in several European and American universities, including Leiden and Humboldt University, and Cornell, UC Berkeley, and Columbia. From 2010 to 2016 I was the chief editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. I have authored four books (Politics of Ruins, Lords of Things, Thailand the Worldly Kingdom, and Monastery, Monument, Museum) and edited two more (A Sarong for Clio and Eye of the Beholder).
Supervisors: Dr Craig J. Reynolds, ANU
Phone: +65 6516 3356
Address: Dept of History, 11 Arts Link
Singapore 117570
A full professor at the National University of Singapore since 2017, I have held visiting positions in several European and American universities, including Leiden and Humboldt University, and Cornell, UC Berkeley, and Columbia. From 2010 to 2016 I was the chief editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. I have authored four books (Politics of Ruins, Lords of Things, Thailand the Worldly Kingdom, and Monastery, Monument, Museum) and edited two more (A Sarong for Clio and Eye of the Beholder).
Supervisors: Dr Craig J. Reynolds, ANU
Phone: +65 6516 3356
Address: Dept of History, 11 Arts Link
Singapore 117570
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Part I, “Sacred Geographies,” focuses on the premodern era, when religious credence informed the cultural alteration of landscape, and devotional sites and artifacts, including visual representation of the Buddhist cosmology, were created. Part II, “Antiquities and National History,” covers the 1830s through the 1970s, when antiquarianism, and eventually archaeology, emerged and developed in the kingdom, partly the result of a shift in the elites’ worldview and partly a response to colonial and neocolonial projects of knowledge. Part III, “Discordant Mnemoscapes,” deals with civic monuments and artworks that anchor memory of twentieth-century political events and provide stages for both their commemoration and counter-commemoration by evoking the country’s embattled political present.
Monastery, Monument, Museum shows us how cultural memory represents a kind of palimpsest, the result of multiple inscriptions, reworkings, and manipulations over time. The book will be a rewarding read for historians, art historians, anthropologists, and Buddhism scholars working on Thailand and Southeast Asia generally, as well as for academic and general readers with an interest in memory and material culture.
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9828-9780824866068.aspx
Bringing a wealth of new source material into a theoretically informed discussion, Lords of Things will be required reading for historians of Thailand and Southeast Asia scholars generally. It represents a welcome change from previous studies of Siamese modernization that are almost exclusively concerned with the institutional and economic dimensions of the process or with foreign relations, and will appeal greatly to those interested in transnational cultural flows, the culture of colonialism, the invention of tradition, and the relationship between consumption and identity formation in the modern era.
Part I, “Sacred Geographies,” focuses on the premodern era, when religious credence informed the cultural alteration of landscape, and devotional sites and artifacts, including visual representation of the Buddhist cosmology, were created. Part II, “Antiquities and National History,” covers the 1830s through the 1970s, when antiquarianism, and eventually archaeology, emerged and developed in the kingdom, partly the result of a shift in the elites’ worldview and partly a response to colonial and neocolonial projects of knowledge. Part III, “Discordant Mnemoscapes,” deals with civic monuments and artworks that anchor memory of twentieth-century political events and provide stages for both their commemoration and counter-commemoration by evoking the country’s embattled political present.
Monastery, Monument, Museum shows us how cultural memory represents a kind of palimpsest, the result of multiple inscriptions, reworkings, and manipulations over time. The book will be a rewarding read for historians, art historians, anthropologists, and Buddhism scholars working on Thailand and Southeast Asia generally, as well as for academic and general readers with an interest in memory and material culture.
http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/p-9828-9780824866068.aspx
Bringing a wealth of new source material into a theoretically informed discussion, Lords of Things will be required reading for historians of Thailand and Southeast Asia scholars generally. It represents a welcome change from previous studies of Siamese modernization that are almost exclusively concerned with the institutional and economic dimensions of the process or with foreign relations, and will appeal greatly to those interested in transnational cultural flows, the culture of colonialism, the invention of tradition, and the relationship between consumption and identity formation in the modern era.
In this lecture cultural historian Maurizio Peleggi shared thoughts on notions of originals and copies in the form of duplicated and remade artworks, spanning East and West and the ancient and the contemporary. Drawing on his recent research, Peleggi argues that restoration, replication, and even forgery may be regarded as means to reinforce, revive, and multiply the aura or power of presence of art objects.