C. J. W.-L. Wee is an associate professor of English at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, and was formerly a fellow in the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. He has been a visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi, India and at the Humanities Research Centre, Australian National University. He is the author of Culture, Empire, and the Question of Being Modern (2003) and the editor of Local Cultures and the "New Asia": The State, Culture, and Capitalism in Southeast Asia (2002); he also is the co-editor of Two Plays by Kuo Pao Kun (2002), and is presently co-editing Contesting Performance: Global Genealogies of Research with two other scholars. His recent research interest concerns questions of modernism, postmodernism and the contemporary arts and culture in the East/Southeast Asian context.