Peter van der Veer is a Dutch academic who is the Director at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen in Germany.
[1] Van der Veer published a monograph on the comparative study of religion and nationalism in India and China, entitled The Modern Spirit of Asia.
He served as Dean of the Social Science Faculty and the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research at Amsterdam, as well as Director of the International Institute for the Study of Islam, and was Chairman of the Board of the International Institute for Asian Studies, both in Leiden.
Van der Veer received the Hendrik Muller Award for his social science study of religion.
Van der Veer was editor or co-editor of Orientalism and Post-Colonial Predicament(University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), Nation and Migration (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), Conversion to Modernities (Routledge, 1997), Nation and Religion (Princeton University Press, 1999), Media, War, and Terrorism (Routledge-Curzon, 2003), Patterns of Middle-Class Consumption in India and China (Sage 2007).