UK Southeast Asianists

Dr Matthew Cohen (Royal Holloway, University of London) is now Professor of International Theatre at Royal Holloway (effective April 2011). He continues to tour his one-man show A Dalang in Search of Wayang, with performances at the Buxton Puppet Festival (in July 2011) and the Indonesia Kontemporer Festival at SOAS (October 2011). He delivered the following paper on 13 May 2011: ‘From interpretive to ethnic dance: staging Java and Bali in early twentieth-century America’ at the Department of Dance, Film and Theatre, University of Surrey. Matthew is spending the academic year 2011–12 as a Research Fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, Wassenaar, The Netherlands, working on a book on theatre and performance in modern Indonesia.

Dr Felicia Hughes-Freeland (S0AS) presented the following two papers in 2011: ‘Women’s impacts on cinema in post-Suharto Indonesia: beyond the “victim-virago dichotomy”?’  at the session on ‘Female Filmmakers in Asia’, Joint Conference of the Association for Asian Studies and International Convention of Asian Scholars, Hawai’i, 29 March–3 April 2011, and ‘Japanese-Indonesian hybridity? The case of Didik Nini Thowok’s Bedhaya Hagoromo’, Asia Pacific International Dance Conference, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 21–5 Sept 2011.

Felicia provided this report on Swansea University: SEANS (the Southeast Asia Network Swansea) no longer exists. Our objective to establish a Southeast Asian Studies research centre was thwarted by University restructuring and redeployment in 2009 which resulted in the loss of most staff members with Southeast Asian expertise. The remaining Southeast Asian researchers are Gerard Clarke and Alan Collins, both in the College of Arts and Humanities. I chose to resign from the university as of 1 October 2011 in order to concentrate on my research in visual anthropology and Southeast Asian performance and heritage. To this end I am now a Research Associate in the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies at SOAS.’

Professor Janice Stargardt (University of Cambridge) is working on completing the second volume of  The Ancient Pyu of Burma, The Buddhist Archaeology of Sri Ksetra which is due for publication in 2012. In June 2011 she presented a paper on ‘The interaction between early settlers and their environment in south Thailand, 6th–14th century and impact today’, at the conference on ‘Environmental and Climate Change in India and Southeast Asia: How are Local Cultures Coping?’, Kulturwissensschaftliches Institut, Essen, Germany. Janice will be in Dehua, China, 1–5 November 2011, for the conference on Dehua Ceramics in Historical Perspectives at the Fujian Institute of Archaeology.

Dr Karl Hack (Open University) is researching the Malayan Emergency and violence/terror for a book and made two fieldtrips to Singapore (April) and Washington (September) in 2011. His research project on war and memory in Southeast Asia will be published by NUS Press in early 2012 and covers individual, community and state memories and their juxtaposition. He also gave talks on Malayan topics in London, Lisbon, and New York in 2011. Karl is also Academic Consultant to BBC/Open University series on the British Empire, due to be presented by Jeremy Paxman and screened in early 2012, and writer for the accompanying historical poster on ‘Selling Empire’.

Karl presented the following papers this year: ‘Between two terrors: the people and insurgency in the Malayan Emergency’ at the conference on ‘Counterinsurgency: History, Theory and Practice’, 22-23 September 2011, Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York, and was a member of its workshop on writing peoples' histories of insurgency, preparatory to a book to be issued by the New Press; ‘Violence and the Malayan Emergency’ at the conference on ‘Butcher and Bolt or Hearts and Minds? British Ways of Countering Colonial Revolt: A Historical Perspective’, Institute of Historical Research London, funded by Brunel University and co-sponsored by the US Marine Corps University Foundation, 15-16 September 2011; and ‘Decolonisation in Malaya’ at the conference on ‘The Decolonisation of the Portuguese Empire in Comparative Perspective, Institute of Social Sciences, University of Lisbon, 20-21 June 2011.

Dr Lee Jones (Queen Mary, University of London) conducted fieldwork in South Africa this summer for his project on international economic sanctions. In December 2011 he will be travelling to Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia for fieldwork on the governance of non-traditional security, specifically transboundary pollution (‘haze’ from forest fires). Lee’s PhD student, Boonwara Sumano, will soon be embarking on fieldwork to study the regional liberalisation of labour movement in Southeast Asia. If anyone can help with contacts or advice on this topic, please email Lee at l.c.jones@qmul.ac.uk

Dr Annabel Teh Gallop (British Library) and Venetia Porter of the British Museum gave an illustrated talk on ‘Islamic seals: treasures from the British Library and the British Museum’ to the Friends of Cambridge University Library during the installation at Cambridge University Library of the BL-BM travelling photographic exhibition, ‘Lasting Impression: Seals from the Islamic World', on 19 May 2011. The exhibition has now opened at the Street Gallery, University of Exeter. At the 3rd International Conference on Aceh and Indian Studies in Banda Aceh, 25–26 May 2011, Annabel presented a paper on ‘Two Malay letters from Raffles to Aceh, 1811’, on two recently discovered manuscript letters now held in the Instituto Histórico Geográfico Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro , Brazil.  During this visit to Aceh AG and Andrew Peacock , as co-Directors of the British Academy funded Aseasuk-BIAA research project, ‘Islam, Trade and Politics across the Indian Ocean’, discussed plans for the end-of-project International Workshop to be held in collaboration with the International Centre for Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies (ICAIOS) and IAIN ar-Raniry in Banda Aceh in January 2012.

Dr Laura Noszlopy (Royal Holloway) launched an editorial services consultancy in March 2011, specialising in academic dissertations and publications <www.katakata.co.uk>

Dr Sandra Dudley (University of Leicester) presented the following papers in 2009: ‘Sensory exiles in the field: reflections on research with Karenni refugees in camps in Thailand’, invited research seminar, Department of Third World Studies, University of Ghent, Belgium in October;  ‘Feeling right, or not, in exile: aesthetics, displaced objects and Karenni refugees in northwest Thailand’, invited research seminar, Department of Art History, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, March.

Centre for South East Asian Studies, SOAS

Professor William G. Clarence-Smith’s two strands of research are on ‘Syrians’ in the colonial Philippines c.1860s to c.1940s and rubber in World War II, based on secondary readings. For the former he was on a research trip to Washington DC in August 2011, consulting Philippines documents in National Archives II (College Park) and the Library of Congress Manuscripts Collection. He delivered the following papers in recent months: ‘Near Eastern migration to the Philippines, 1860s-1940s,’ Zentrum Moderner Orient, Free University, Berlin, Germany, 7 July 2011; ‘Equids in Southeast Asia in the longue durée,’ at conference ‘Southeast Asia: the longue durée,’ Leiden University, The Netherlands, 24–26 August 2011; ‘Trends in global history,’ at workshop ‘Business history as global history,’ BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo, Norway, 12 September 2011; ‘Betel and areca: commodities in crisis,’ at workshop ‘Fragility and disconnections of global commodity chains,’ University of Konstanz, Germany, 15–17 September 2011; and ‘Rubber cultivation in Indonesia and the Congo from the 1930s to the 1950s: divergent paths,’ at the conference ‘Colonial rule in the Netherlands Indies and Belgian Congo: comparing changing institutions of extraction and development,’ University of Antwerp, Belgium, 7–8 October 2011.

Abroad

Dr Chiara Formichi has been appointed Assistant Professor at the Asian and International Studies Department, City University Hong Kong. Her current research projects are on: ‘Shi’a Islam and ‘Alid piety in Southeast Asia’, and ‘The impact of Mustafa Kemal’s secularization of Turkey on Indonesian nationalism’ (funded by the British Institute at Ankara, BIAA). Chiara convened  the international workshop ‘Placing Religious Pluralism in Asia’s Global Cities’, at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, 5–6 May 2011.

Professor Michael Hitchcock (IMI University Centre, Lucerne, Switzerland) has been actively engaged on recruitment visits to Southeast Asia over the last two years. In March 2010 he visited Ho Chi Minh City and Danang, and took time off to do some research in Hué and its environs. In September he visited Malaysia and Singapore, and interviewed the curator of the Soaring Phoenix of the South Temple, which has a UNESCO award. In November he visited northwest and northeast Thailand but his plans to re-visit the sites around Yogya that he researched in 2009 were disrupted by the eruption of Mount Merapi. IMI’s agent in Indonesia rapidly arranged a promotional lecture tour for him that took him to North Sulawesi, Sumatra, Bandung and Jakarta.

In connection with the Aseasuk/British Institute in Ankara collaborative research project he visited Istanbul 20–26th March 2011 before going on to a conference organized by the Antalya Tourism Academy.