Victor Lieberman


Victor B. Lieberman is an historian of early modern Southeast Asia and Eurasia. He presently serves as the Raoul Wallenberg Distinguished University Professor of History and Professor of Asian and Comparative History at the University of Michigan, where he began teaching in 1984. That year he published a seminal work, Burmese Administrative Cycles: Anarchy and Conquest, c.1580-1760, which profoundly impacted scholarship on mainland Southeast Asia through an analysis of alternating governance patterns in 16th- to 18th-century Burma. Totaling some 1500 pages, his more recent two-volume study Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830 argued that in terms of basic dynamics, chronology, and trajectory, patterns of political and cultural integration in mainland Southeast Asia over several centuries resembled those in much of Europe and Japan, and to a lesser extent, in China and South Asia. A lead featured review in the principal journal of history, The American Historical Review, in 2012 claimed that "Lieberman's two-volume magnum opus is the most important work of history produced so far this century." Two international conferences, in London and Osaka, have been held to discuss Lieberman's scholarship, and each of the two chief journals of Asian studies, Modern Asian Studies and The Journal of Asian Studies, has devoted a special edition to his work. His books have won prizes from the World History Association and the Association for Asian Studies. In 2014 he won the Golden Apple Award, conferred by student ballot, as the best teacher at the University of Michigan.
Lieberman obtained his Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University in 1967, graduating first in his class with summa cum laude distinction. He obtained a PhD in Southeast Asian history from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London in 1976.

Publications