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Maurizio Peleggi

Portrait of Maurizio   Peleggi

Maurizio Peleggi is a professor at the Department of History, National University of Singapore (NUS) since 2017, and a researcher focusing on the cultural dimension of Southeast Asian modernity, visual and material culture, history and practice of Heritage Conservation, museology and Thailand’s cultural history.

Born and raised in Rome, Italy, where he majored in Chinese History at La Sapienza University in 1991, he moved to Thailand and developed an interest in the country’s history and culture, leading him to pursue further studies at the Australian National University, where he obtained a MA (Asian Studies) in 1994 and a PhD in 1998 with a doctoral dissertation titled: ​“The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Public Image.”

A full professor at NUS, Maurizio Peleggi has taught several courses including ​“Uses of the Past: Memory, Heritage and History”, ​“A History of East/​West Artistic Interactions”, as well as the segment on culture and society in ​“The Making of the Modern World”. He was a visiting professor at the Southeast Asia Studies Program, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA (2005), the International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden – Amsterdam, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley, USA (2009), the College of Asia and the Pacific, Australian National University (2013), the Institute of Asian and African Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin (2016), Université Paris VII-Diderot (2017), and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America, Columbia University (2019).

Publications

  1. “National Heritage and Global Tourism in Thailand.” Annals of Tourism Research 23 – 2, special issue ​“Heritage and Tourism”, 1996: 432 – 448.
  2. “Shifting Alterity: The Mongol in the Visual and Literary Culture of the Late Middle Ages.” Medieval History Journal 4 – 1, 2001: 15 – 33.
  3. Lords of Things: The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002, 248 p., ISBN-13 ‎ 978 – 0824825584.
  4. The Politics of Ruins and the Business of Nostalgia, Bangkok: White Lotus, 2002.
  5. “Royal Antiquarianism, European Orientalism, and the Production of Archaeological Knowledge in Modern Siam.” In Asia in Europe, Europe in Asia, eds S. Ravi, M. Rutten and Goh B‑L., Leiden: KITVL and Singapore: ISEAS, 2004: 133 – 61.
  6. “King Chulalongkorn in Thai Collective Memory.” In King Chulalongkorn, Southeast Asia and Jambudvija, ed. Charnvit Kasetsiri and Onanong Thippimol, Bangkok: Foundation for the Promotion of Social Sciences, 2004: 134 – 51.
  7. “Consuming Colonial Nostalgia: The Monumentalisation of Historic Hotels in Urban Southeast Asia,” Asia-Pacific Viewpoint 46, 3, special issue ​“Place, Memory and Identity”, 2005: 1 – 11; repr. in Tourism in East and Southeast Asia, ed. D. Harrison, V.T. King & J.S. Eades, London: Routledge, 2018, Vol. 1, Chap. 8.
  8. [ed. with John Clark & T. K. Sabapathy] Eye of the Beholder: Reception, Audience and Practice of Modern Asian Art, Sydney: Wild Peony Press, 2006.
  9. “Re-fashioning Civilization: Dress and Bodily Practice in Thai Nation-Building.” In Dress, Gender and Nationalism in Asia and the Americas, ed. L. Edwards and M. Roces, Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007: 65 – 80.
  10. Thailand: The Worldly Kingdom, London: Reaktion, 2007, 330 p. ISBN-13 978 – 1861894601.
  11. “Benevolent Kings, Warrior Queens and Student Martyrs: The Master Plot and Subplots of Thai History.” In Culture and Power: The Plots of History in Performance, ed. R. V. Miyares and C. R. Gonzalez, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008: 211 – 18.
  12. “Shifting Alterity: The Mongol in the Visual and Literary Culture of the Late Middle Ages.” In Travellers, Intellectuals and the World beyond Medieval Europe, ed. J. Muldoon, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010: 311 – 29.
  13. “The Unbearable Impermanence of Things: Reflections on Buddhism, Cultural Memory and Heritage Conservation.” In Routledge Handbook of Heritage in Asia, ed. Patrick Daly and Tim Winter, London and NY: Routledge, 2012: 55 – 68.
  14. “The Material and Social Life of Colonial Hotels: Comfort Zones as Contact Zones in British Colombo and Singapore.” Journal of Social History 46 – 1 (2012): 124 – 53.
  15. “The Turbaned and the Hatted: Figures of Alterity in Early Modern Thai Visual Culture.” In Images of Otherness in Medieval and Early Modern Times: Exclusion, Inclusion and Assimilation, eds. Anja Eisenbeiß and Lieselotte Saurma, Munich: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2012: 57 – 69.
  16. “The Aesthetics and Politics of Royal Portraiture in Thailand.” Ars Orientalis 43, special issue ​“Imperial Portraiture and early Photography in Asia”, 2013: 83 – 93.
  17. “From Buddhist Icons to National Antiquities: Cultural Nationalism and Colonial Knowledge in the Making of Thailand’s History of Art.” Modern Asian Studies 47 – 5, 2013: 1520 – 48.
  18. [editor] A sarong for Clio: essays in the intellectual and cultural history of Thailand, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University SEAP Publications, 2015, 240 p., ISBN-13 978 – 0877277668.
  19. “On History, Thailand, and the Scholarship of Craig J. Reynolds,” and ​“The Plot of Thai Art History: Buddhist Sculpture and the Myth of National Origins.” In A sarong for Clio, Cornell University SEAP Publications, 2015: 1 – 16; 79 – 93.
  20. “Thai Kingdom, from 1400 CE.” In Encyclopedia of Empire, gen. ed. N. Dalziel and John McKenzie, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016.
  21. “Excavating Southeast Asian Prehistory in the Cold War: American Archaeology in Neocolonial Thailand” Journal of Social Archaeology 16, 2016: 94 – 111. [Thai translation in Warasan Prawatisat Thammasat 7, 1 (2020): 105 – 35.]
  22. Monastery, monument, museum: Sites and artifacts of Thai cultural memory, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2017, 280 p. ISBN-13 ‎ 978 – 0824866068.
  23. “A theory of devotional conservation: A preliminary proposal,” ACADEMIA Letters, Jan. 2021: 1 – 6.
  24. “Art, Architecture, and National Memory-Making.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion, gen. ed. Richard Payne and G. T. Halkias (Oxford: OUP, 2021 [online publication].
  25. “When Shrines and Images Grow Tired: Toward a Theory of Devotional Restoration.” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 2022.
  26. “The Power of the Copy: Rethinking Replication through the Cult Image.” British Journal of Aesthetics, 2022.
  27. book reviews, short articles, thesis supervisions [see a list on Acad​e​mia​.eu]
  28. ‏“The Cultural Biography of Things as National Biography: The Ramkhamhaeng Inscription in Thai Social and Cultural Memory.” In Brill Handbook in Memory Studies: Southeast Asian Contexts, eds. Elsa Clavé and Quan Tran, Leiden, Brill [forthcoming].

Keynotes, Lectures, Conference & Workshop Papers

  1. “Antiquarianism, Orientalism, and Siam’s Archaeological Heritage,” New Zealand Asian Studies Conference, Asian Futures, Asian Traditions, Christchurch, New Zealand, 28 – 30 Nov 2001.
  2. “A Toast to the Empire: Hotel Restoration, Tourism Consumption and Colonial Nostalgia”. ICAS3, Singapore (19 – 22 August)
  3. “Icons into Artworks.” International workshop, The Allure of the West, Cornell University, 5 – 7 November 2004.
  4. 2004 ​“National hero, Tutelary Spirit, and Conspicuous Consumer: King Chulalongkorn in Thai Public memory.” Depts of History & East Asian Studies Seminar, Brown University, Rhode Island (8 Nov.)
  5. “Consuming colonial nostalgia in urban Southeast Asia.” International workshop: Place, Memory and Identity in New Asia, National University of Singapore, 25 – 26 May 2004.
  6. “Modernism and Modernity in the Art of Alberto Giacometti.” Held in conjunction with Seeing, Feeling, Being: Alberto Giacometti, Singapore Art Museum, 24 May 2008.
  7. 2011 ​“From Image to Icon: The Aesthetics and Politics of Thai Royal Portraiture.” International symposium Imperial Exposure: Early Photography and Royal Portraits across Asia, Sacker and Freer Gallery, Smithsonian Museum, Washington DC (8 – 9 December) 2011 ​“Whose Memories Are Evoked in Colonial Mnemonic Sites.” International Workshop, Colonial Nostalgia: Memories, Objects and Performances, KITVL, Leiden (27 – 28 October) 2009 ​“Colonial Hotels in the Asian City.” AAS conf., Chicago (26 – 29 March) 2007 ​“Benevolent kings, warrior queens and student martyrs.” 12 th Culture & Power International Conference: The Plots of History, Universidad de Oviedo (25 – 28 September)
  8. 2011 ​“The Emergence of Thailand’s History of Art as a Field of Studies.” Center for Southeast Asian Studies Seminar Series, University of Michigan (21 October) 2010 ​“Figures of Alterity in Thai Early Modern Visual Culture.” International symposium Images of the Other in Medieval and Early Modern Times, Karl Jasper Center, Heidelberg University (17 – 19 June) 2009 ​“The Social Lives of Buddhist Icons.” International symposium Object/​Knowledge: Art, Artifact and Authority in Southeast Asia, University of California, Berkeley (30 – 31 October) 2005 ​“Politics in the Age of Telecommunications: Thailand’s Thaksin and Italy’s Berlusconi Compared.” CSEAP Brown Bag Lecture Series, Cornell University (22 September) 2003 ​“King Chulalongkorn in Thai Public Memory.” Keynote, Symposium King Chulalongkorn, India and Southeast Asia, Thammasat University, Bangkok (28 November)
  10. 2017 ​“Museums in Southeast Asia: A Brief History.” Historia Public Lecture Series, National Museum of Singapore (7 October) 2015 ​“On Looking as a Historically Situated Cultural Practice.” Curating LAB 3: Pictureshow, NUS Museum (31 January) 2012 ​“Longing for Inconspicuousness: Nation-Building, Built Heritage and Collective Memories in Singapore.” Inaugural lecture, Preservation of Monument Board Public Lecture Series, National Museum Singapore (12 October) 2011 ​“Oriental Impressions: Japanese Visual Culture in the Making of Modern Art,” for the Art & Modernity Lecture Series held in conjunction with the exhibition Masterpieces from the Musee d’Orsay, National Museum of Singapore (18 November)
  11. 2019 ​“The King’s Image: Sartorial Innovation and Neo-traditionalism of the Thai Monarchy.” University of Naples ​“L’Orientale” (27 June) 2017 ​“Remembering Political Violence in Thailand.” SciencesPo, Paris (7 December) 2017 ​“The Social Lives of Thai Buddha Images.” La Sorbonne, Paris (30 November) 2016 ​“Journeys of the Itinerant Buddhas.” Betonsalon Center for Art and Research, Université Paris VII-Diderot (29 October) 2016 ​“Prehistory and the Cold War: American Archaeology in Neocolonial Thailand.” 6th Annual Thailand@Harvard Lecture, Asia Center, Harvard University (26 April) 2014 ​“Using Artworks as a Source for Historical Studies.” Keynote, Changing Humanities in a Changing World Conference, Chiangmai University (27 November) 2011 ​“Comfort Zones as Contact Zones: Hotels in Colonial Colombo and Singapore”, KITVL/IIAS Seminar Series, Leiden (25 October) 2011 ​“Foreign Devils, Benign Monsters: Westerners (and other Foreigners) in Thai Buddhist Cosmographies.” History of Art Freer Symposium: Barbarians, Monsters and Mutants: Asian Inventions of Human ​‘Others’, University of Michigan (22 Oct.) Available at: htpp://leccap.engin.unimich.edu/leccap/view/mb1z03s6qlw409hwni0/14556
  12. 2019 ​“Archaeology and Ideology in Cold War Southeast Asia.” 4 th ItaSEAS International Conference, University of Naples ​“L’Orientale” (21−23 May) 2018 ​“The Archeological Object and Its Images.” International Workshop, Diplomatic Images, Yale-NUS College (11−12 April) 2016 ​“Is there an Italian Way to Southeast Asian Studies? Three Geocultural Perspectives from Australia, the USA, and Singapore.” 3 rd ItaSEAS International Conference, University of Naples ​“L’Orientale” (20−22 June) 2016 ​“Thai Archaeology as a Product of Colonial and Cold War Projects of Knowledge.” UC Berkeley/​UCLA International Conference, Making Southeast Asian Culture: From Region to World, UC Berkeley (22−23 April) 2014 ​“Excavating Thailand’s Prehistory in the Cold War.” 12 h International Thai studies Conference, University of Sydney (22 – 24 April) 2012 ​“The Politics of Thai Archaeology.” EurASEAA 14 th International Conference, Dublin (18−21 September)
  13. The Original, The Copy, and The Remade: Artworks and Their Doubles
    Held on 25th May 2024, at the National Gallery Singapore, the lecture titled: The Original, The Copy, and The Remade: Artworks and Their Doubles”