Viren Murthy
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Member of the Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies and thereby authorized to supervise theses.
Office: 145 Séraphin Marion Street, pièce 206
Telephone: 613-562-5800 poste 1278
Courriel : vmurthy@uOttawa.ca
Viren Murthy initially studied philosophy at the University of Hawaii before joining the PhD. program in History at the University of Chicago and his work combines these two disciplines. He completed a dissertation entitled, “The Myriad Things Stem from Confusion: Nationalism, Ontology and Resistance in Zhang Taiyan’s Philosophy” in 2006. He is generally interested in the attempts of East Asian intellectuals to resist modernity through reviving aspects of the tradition and, in particular, Buddhism. In this light, he also studies the Chinese and Japanese intellectuals of the 1930s and 60s who combine traditional ideas with modern ideologies such as Marxism.
Although his work is historical it constantly hovers around themes that are relevant to contemporary China and Japan, such as nationalism, Marxism, liberalism and the problem of modernity. Thus he is also intrigued by the writings of contemporary Chinese and Japanese intellectuals such as Wang Hui, Sun Ge and Karatani Kôjin. His articles have appeared in Modern Intellectual History, Dushu (the Reader) and Chûgoku tetsugaku kenkyû.
University degrees
2007 ― PhD History, University of Chicago, Illinois
1993 ― MA Philosophy, University of Hawaii at Manoa
1990 ― BA Philosophy, Lake Forest College, Illinois
Fields of interest
- Modern Chinese intellectual history
- Modern Japanese intellectual history
- Marxism and historiography
Ongoing research
Lu Xun, Takeuchi Yoshimi and the idea of Chinese modernity as resistance.
Selected publications
“Equalization as Difference: Zhang Taiyan’s Buddhist-Daoist Response to Modern Politics,” Forthcoming in IIAS Newsletter, June, 2007.
“Modernity Against Modernity: Wang Hui’s Critical History of Chinese Thought,” Modern Intellectual History Vol. 3.1, April, 2006.
“Between Universality and Particularity: Zhang Taiyan’s Early Thought,” (in Japanese, coauthored with Onodera Shirō), Chūgoku Tetsugaku Kenkyū (Research in Chinese Philosophy), Vol. 11, 2005.
“A Tale of Two Modernities: Wang Hui’s Genealogy of Modern Chinese Thought” (in Chinese) Zhongguo Shuping (China Book Review), 2005.
“The Politics of Fengjian in Late Qing and Early Republican China” forthcoming in Kai-wing Chow, Tze-ki Hon and Hung-yok Ip ed., Modernities as Local Practices, Nationalism, and Cultural Production: Deconstructing the May-Fourth Paradigm on Modern China, from Lexington Books.
