UK Southeast Asianists
Dr Raymond Bryant (King’s College London) has been appointed Professor of Political Ecology as of September 2009. He is currently conducting exploratory work on Malaysia/Singapore ‘alternative' consumption’ (i.e. organic, fair trade). Raymond was invited speaker at the Conference of the University of Chicago’s Program on the Global Environment in May 2008 where he delivered a paper on ‘The fate of the branded forest: science, violence and seduction in the world of teak’.
Dr Ruth Barnes (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford) has been appointed the inaugural curator for the Indo-Pacific Art Department of Yale University Art Gallery. Ruth begins on a consulting basis as of April 2009 and will assume full time responsibility in January 2010. The gallery has some 500 artefacts from Southeast Asia and a similar number of Indonesian textiles. Besides organising rotating installations, Ruth will also be directing research, publications, special exhibitions, and teaching based on current Yale holdings and artworks to be borrowed from private and public institutions. Meanwhile at the Ashmolean, Ruth is lead curator for three exhibitions in 2009: Asian Crossroads (400 AD to 1500 AD), West meets East (1500 AD onwards), and Textiles.
Dr Matthew Isaac Cohen (Royal Holloway) is in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, between February and June 2009 as a visiting academic at Sanata Dharma, giving seminars at Sanata Dharma, ISI Yogyakarta, Universitas Gajdah Mada and other higher educational institutions on his forthcoming book Performing otherness: Java and Bali on international stages, 1905-1952 (Palgrave Macmillan). He has also visited his old field site of Cirebon, West Java, where he is planning to do further research on puppetry, and has been performing puppetry around Cirebon and Yogyakarta, including a contemporary wayang based on the underground cartoons of Eko Nugroho. He was appointed to the research and publication commissions of UNIMA, the international, UNESCO-affiliated puppetry organisation in 2008.
Professor Graeme Barker (University of Cambridge) is currently involved in the publication of the Niah Cave Project, Sarawak, an investigation by a team of archaeologists and geographers of the human and environmental history of the caves, to be published as two monographs by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research and Sarawak Museums: Graeme Barker, David Gilbertson, and Tim Reynolds (eds) ‘Rainforest Foraging and Farming in Island Southeast Asia: the Archaeology and Environmental History of the Niah Caves, Sarawak’, and ‘The Archaeology of the Niah Caves, Sarawak: Excavations 1954-2004’. About 40 papers have been published on the project since its inception in 2000.
Graeme is also Principal Investigator on ‘The Cultured Rainforest: long-term human ecological histories in the highlands of Borneo’ project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council within their Landscape and Environment strategic research initiative, with funding from April 2007 to March 2010. The project involves archaeology, palaeoecology, and anthropology, and collaboration between the Universities of Cambridge, Queens University Belfast (Dr Chris Hunt), Leicester (Dr Huw Barton), Oxford (Professor Chris Gosden), and Sussex (Dr Monica Janowski) in the UK and UNIMAS (Jayl Langub) in Sarawak, with Sarawak Museums (Ipoi Datan).
Dr Lindsay Lloyd-Smith (University of Cambridge) is currently a Research Associate for the multi-disciplinary Cultured Rainforest Project directed by Professor Barker. This initiative combines palaeoecology, archaeology and anthropo-logy to investigate long-term and present-day human-rainforest relationships in the Kelabit highlands of Sarawak. Lindsay is coordinating the archaeological research for the project and will be carrying out an extended period of fieldwork later this year.
Professor VT King (Leeds University) is currently on a seven-month period of research leave and is engaged in writing a companion volume to his The sociology of Southeast Asia: transformations in a developing region (2008) provisionally entitled ‘Identities in motion: the sociology of culture and cultural change in Southeast Asia’, which he hopes to have finished by mid 2010.
As Chair of the RAE 2008 sub-panel on Asian Studies he was responsible for co-ordinating and, with input and advice from fellow panellists, writing an overview report on Asian Studies in the UK based on the submissions and the results of the exercise. The report will be available in the public domain in due course.
He recently served as external examiner for two PhD theses on Sabah/British North Borneo, both of which were successfully defended, one at SOAS and the other at Loughborough. He has also been re-appointed as external examiner by Universiti Brunei Darussalam in sociology and anthropology for 2009-2011, a responsibility he took on in the early 2000s when the university launched its anthropology programme. He chaired a panel at the conference organised by CRASSH in Cambridge 26-28 March 2009 on the theme of ‘Continuity and Change: (Re)-Conceptualizing Power in Southeast Asia’ (see Conference reports).
Dr Laura Noszlopy (Royal Holloway, University of London) won the 'Best Abstract' award at the ASAA (Asian Studies Association of Australia) conference at Monash, Melbourne for her paper, ‘Getting it up and keeping it up: young men, community and competitive kiting in contemporary Bali’. She is currently doing research for a biography of John Coast, who had a life-long passion for Southeast Asia and its cultures. In 2008, she was in Thailand to visits sites where Coast was interned along the 'Kwai' Railway line, and Indonesia to work with surviving dancers from his 1950s Dancers of Bali tour and others who remember him. She also visited New York to research the archive of Coast's personal letters, notes and files, kept by his former partner and for personal interviews.
In May-June 2009, Laura will be taking up a research fellowship at IIAS, Leiden University, and making a research trip to Jakarta and Bali in the autumn. Laura co-convened the 'Southeast Asian Performance: transnational perspectives' panel with Matthew I Cohen at ASEASUK June 2008 conference at Liverpool John Moores University. She presented a paper on the transnational aspects of John Coast's Dancers of Bali tour. The papers have formed the basis for a volume co-edited with Matthew and due for completion later this year.
In February 2009 Dr Katherine Brickell (Royal Holloway) spoke on ‘Youth rural-urban migration in Cambodia’ at an ASEF Alliance Workshop Series conference in Bangkok, Thailand, entitled ‘Perspectives on Children’s Active Engagement with Migration in the Southeast Asian Context’. She was also in central Vietnam for a preliminary research trip with collaborations formed with Hue University and the local NGO, Centre for Social Research and Development (CSRD). In March this year Katherine organised a session entitled ‘Gendered Geographies of Transition in Southeast Asia’ at the Association of American Geographers (AAG) Annual Meeting, Las Vegas where. she presented a paper entitled: ‘Gendered Discourses on Ideals and Practices of Women in Contemporary Cambodia’. Katherine has also been awarded a grant by the Aseasuk Research Committee for a project entitled ‘Gender, Labour and Domestic Life in Luang Prabang’ (£4,000 from October 09- September 2010).
Dr Alexandra Winkels (University of East Anglia) is continuing her research (since 2000) on the connections between migration and development in Vietnam with special attention to the vulnerability of migrants and their families in the contexts of social, economic and environ-mental changes. Alexandra presented a joint paper with H. Eakin and J. Sendzimir on ‘Nested vulnerability: exploring cross-scale linkages and tele-connections in Mexican and Vietnamese coffee systems’, at the IDHP Open Meeting 2009 and 7th International Science Conference on the Human Dimensions of Global Environmental Change, 26-30 April 2009, Bonn.
Dr Fiona Kerlogue (Horniman Museum) is currently researching the Horniman Museum’s collections of photographs and film from Walter Spies, Beryl de Zoete and others, through elicitation in the field with a focus on religious context. This research will lead to an exhibition on aspects of Balinese culture relating to the documentary material, planned for 2012. In July 2008 Fiona was in Kalimantan, Indonesia, to present ‘Memory, materiality and Malay culture: a case study’ at the 5th International Symposium of Jurnal Antropologi Indonesia, 22-26 July 2008, University of Lambung Mangkurat.
Dr Annabel Gallop (British Library) has been helping to organise the exhibition 'Raffles' Ark Redrawn: Natural History Drawings from the Collection of Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles', which will be held at Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, from 9 May to 5 July 2009. On display will be 29 drawings of birds, plants and mammals from Sumatra and Penang, part of the Raffles Family Collection acquired in 2007 by the British Library. The exhibition is curated by Dr Henry Noltie, author of the accom-panying book of the same title, comprising a full-colour complete catalogue of the 120 natural history drawings in the Raffles Family Collection.
On 24 February 2009 Annabel attended the International Board meeting of the newly formed International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies, representing ASEASUK, an institutional member of the Board. Her visit to Aceh was jointly supported by ASEASUK and the ASEASUK -British Institute in Ankara’s three-year British Academy-funded project on Ottoman links with Southeast Asia. She also presented a paper on ‘Sultanah Tajul Alam’s tarakata of 1666: the earliest known original royal decree from Aceh,’ 2nd International Conference on Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies, Banda Aceh, Indonesia, 23-24 February 2009. Annabel delivered two further papers in Malaysia in November 2008: ‘The art of the Qur’an in Java: some preliminary observations’, Islamic Area Studies Conference, Waseda University and Universiti Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, and ‘Palace and pondok: artistic patronage on the East Coast of the Malay peninsula’, at Seminar Seni Ukir Kayu Melayu: Warisan Nik Rashiddin Nik Hussein, ATMA & Kandis Resource Centre, Kampung Kandis, Kelantan.
Following the publication of her monograph, Embodied communities: dance traditions and change in Java, Dr Felicia Hughes-Freeland (Swansea University) is now developing new research projects which build on or develop her dance and visual anthropology interests in different ways. If the first of these, ANR-ESRC funding for a collaborative dance project of French and British scholars, is successful, she will complete her research and film about the horse dance (jathilan) in the Yogya region. As part of her research on cultural politics, she is currently editing a special issue of Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. Meanwhile, Felicia is organizing the 25th ASEASUK conference in Swansea this year, and trying to develop the university’s Southeast Asian network (SEANS) into a research centre.
Felicia delivered the following paper, ‘The seduction of stones: monuments as narratives of nationhood’, panel on 'Monumentalizing the Past, Archae-ologies of the Future', that she and Dr P. Dransart convened at the conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of UK and the Commonwealth on ‘Anthropological and Archaeological Imaginations: Past, Present and Future’, Bristol, 8 April 2009.
Dr Margaret Coldiron (Durham University) brought Professor I Wayan Dibia from ISI Denpasar for a week of intensive, practice-based work with the AHRC-funded research project ‘The body and the mask in ancient theatre space’. Margaret also appeared as the demon king Rahwana in a performance of Kecak Ramayana directed by I Wayan Dibia at LSO St Luke's in London.
Centre of South East Asian Studies, SOAS
Dr Ben Murtagh is the current Director of the Royal Asiatic Society. He spent a month in Jakarta and three months in Surabaya in the second half of 2008 researching representations of gay lesbian and waria in Indonesian cinema. While there he gave two papers at Universiti Airlangga on ‘Representing other sexualities in Indonesian cinema’ and ‘Approaching sexuality in Indonesia through film’ (November and December 2008). Ben continues to be co-managing editor of Indonesia and the Malay World and Chair of the SOAS Centre for South East Asian Studies.
Dr Rachel Harrison (SOAS) is currently undertaking research for a monograph on contemporary Thai cinema. Rachel is Head of Department of South East Asia and also Head of the South Asia Department.
Dr Susan Conway (SOAS) has been awarded a British Academy grant for her research on Shan Buddhist ritual practices (2009-2010). She undertook a field trip to Shan monasteries in Thailand (Jan-Feb 2009). Susan also presented a paper on ‘Shan dress and textiles: ancient traditions and modern trends’ at the 2nd ASEAN Cultural Conference in Manila, February 2009.
Cambridge University Southeast Asian Forum
Southeast Asia is a region of interest to increasing numbers of scholars and students in Cambridge. 2009 alone will have seen the staging of a major interdisciplinary conference on ‘power’ in Southeast Asia, a conference on trading in Southeast Asia, the launch of a new undergraduate paper on ‘The Ethnography of Southeast Asia’ within the Archaeology and Anthropology faculty, and the consolidation of a new paper on ‘The Politics of Southeast Asia’ within PPSIS. Southeast Asian affairs are increasingly on Cambridge’s intellectual agenda. They are also very much on the personal agendas of the university’s large and vibrant community of Southeast Asian students, which the Cambridge University Reporter numbers at approximately 500 in any given year.
The Southeast Asian Forum aims to connect and to some extent co-ordinate this rising tide of interest in the region. The Forum provides an opportunity for Cambridge-based scholars working on Southeast Asia as well as those with a personal interest in the region to discuss and debate issues affecting it with experts from around the world, including academics, activists, and professionals. Distinctively, we want to move beyond the format of guest ‘seminar papers’ and ‘lectures’. Where possible, we wish to foreground discussion and dialogue, putting visiting guests ‘in conversation’ with expert Cambridge academics to allow issues of great academic significance to be accessible to as wide an audience as possible. For a list of planned events as well as a new directory of Cambridge students and staff working on Southeast Asia see: www.cuseaf.com and Conference reports on this site.
