Viren Murthy teaches transnational Asian History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and researches Chinese, Japanese and Indian intellectual history.  He is the author of The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Brill, 2011), The Politics of Time in China and Japan, Routledge, 2022, paperback 2024) and Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution (University of Chicago, 2023).  He is co-editor with Prasenjit Duara and Andrew Sartori of A Companion to Global Historical Thought, (Blackwell, 2014), co-editor with Joyce Liu of East Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories (Routledge, 2017) and co-editor with Max Ward and Fabian Schäfer of Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Brill, 2017).  He has published articles in Modern Intellectual History, Modern China, Frontiers of History in China and Positions: Asia Critique, Jewish Social Studies, Critical Historical Studies, Journal of Labor and Society.

Viren Murthy is interested in critics of modernity in Asia, specifically, China, Japan and India.  He places the history of nationalism and transnationalism in the larger trajectory of global capitalism and examine how pan-Asianists, Third Worldists, Marxists and postcolonialists theorize resistance to imperialism and capitalism and posit a world beyond the present.  Central to his work is the politics of the nation-form.  Pan-Asianists and Third Worldists believed that the nation-form would be able to combine anti-imperialism with a politics of socialism. He researches the conditions for the possibility of such theories in the early postwar period and the ask whether their categories and politics continue to be germane to our neo-liberal present.

Education: B.A. Lake Forest College; M.A. (1992) University of Hawaii at Manoa; Ph.D. (2007) University of Chicago

Research and teaching specializations: East Asian civilization, pan-Asianism, popular culture in Asia, Japanese history, intellectual history of China, Japan and India, postcolonialism, Marxism, Social theory, Comparative Philosophy, History of Carnatic Music

Selected publications:

• Pan-Asianism and the Legacy of the Chinese Revolution: History, Philosophy and Resistance, University of Chicago Press, October, 2023.
• The Politics of Time in Japan and China: Back to the Future, London: Routledge, June, 2022. Paperback 2024.
• The Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
• Chinese translation Zhang Taiyan de zhengzhi zhexue: yishi de dikang Chuntian Zhang, Zhijun Ren et al. trans., Shanghai: Huadong Normal University Press, 2018.
• Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking Kyoto School Philosophy (Eds: Schäfer, Ward & Murthy) Brill, 2017.
• East-Asian Marxisms and Their Trajectories. (Eds: Liu & Murthy) Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2017.
• A Companion to Global Historical Thought. (Eds: Sartori, Duara & Murthy) Wiley, 2014.
• The Challenge of Linear Time: Nationhood and the Politics of History in East Asia (Eds: Murthy & Schneider), Leiden: Brill, 2013, 2014.
• [P] “Rethinking Philosophy in the Age of Science”, co-authored with Yuji Xu, in Chinese Thought from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century, edited by Selusi Ambrogio and Dawid Rogacz. Vol. 3 of Chinese Philosophy and Its Thinkers: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024, 65-89.
• [P] “Raga and the Problem of Ownership: Knowledge and Culture in Carnatic Music”, co-authored with Annapurna, Mamidipudi, in Dagmar Schäfer, Annapurna Mamidipudi and Marius Buning eds., Ownership of Knowledge: Beyond Intellectual Property, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2023, 121-152.
• [P] “Takeuchi Yoshimi and Deweyan Democracy in Postwar Japan”, in Roger T. Ames, Yajun Chen and Peter D. Herschock eds., Confucianism and Deweyan Pragmatism: Resources for a New Geopolitics of Interdependence, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2021, 157-190.
• [P] “Takeuchi Yoshimi and the Problem of Tenkō” in Irene Hayter, George T. Sipos and Mark Williams eds., Tenkō in Transwar Japan: Culture, Politics, History, London: Routledge University Press, 2021, 65-84.
• [P] “Rethinking Pan-Asianism through Zhang Taiyan: India as Method” in Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui eds, Beyond Pan-Asianism: Connecting India and China, 1911-1949, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021, 94-128.
• [P] “Umemoto Katsumi, Subjective Nothingness and the Critique of Civil Society” in Confronting Capital and Empire: Rethinking the Kyoto School, co-edited with Fabian Schäfer and Max Ward, Leiden: Brill, 2017, 263-287.
• “Beyond Particularity and Universality: Moishe Postone and the Possibilities of Jewish Marxism,” Jewish Social Studies, Feb., 2020.
• “Moishe Postone’s Historical Time: Capital, the Holocaust and Jewish Marxism,” forthcoming, Critical Historical Studies, June, 2020.
• “The Politics of Time in China and Japan” in Leigh Jenco and Murad Idris ed. Oxford Encyclopedia of Political Theory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
• “Rethinking Pan-Asianism through Zhang Taiyan: India as Method” forthcoming in Tansen Sen and Brian Tsui eds, Beyond Pan-Asianism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020.
• “Takeuchi and the Problem of Tenkō” forthcoming in Irene Hayter, George T. Sipos and Mark Williams eds., Tenkō in Transwar Japan: Culture, Politics, History, London: Routledge, 2020.
• “Transfiguring Modern Temporality: Zhang Taiyan’s Critique of Evolutionary History,” in Modern China, September, 2012.