The Lost History of the Mekong Delta
Last weekend I participated in a weekly online forum in Vietnam called “Midnight Talks.” The topic this past week was on “The Lost History of the Mekong Delta.”I presented together…
Kelley on Vietnamese History, Area Studies & Asian Studies
I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Liam C. Kelley of the Institute of Asian Studies (IAS) at Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD). . . and we talked about his research…
The Defenders are Saving the Universe
What does a science fiction story about a couple of aliens saving the universe have to do with Southeast Asian history or higher education??Trust me. There's a connection.Watch the video…
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: The Cold War (Week 8)
While I’m not particularly interested in political history, I always find it important to keep up with developments in that field, as new scholarship can dramatically change long-held beliefs.
This week we looked at some new scholarship on the beginnings of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and also took a look at some writings on the Bandung Conference. With China investing heavily in Africa these days, there is a growing interest among some scholars to look at the history of Afro-Asian interactions, and the Bandung Conference is an obvious topic of interest.
I predict that there will be some interesting scholarship that will emerge in the next few years on this topic, and so we took a brief look at the Bandung Conference to get a sense of what that was all about.
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: Everyday Technology (Week 7)
Everyday, or common, forms of technology, such as radios, televisions, and sewing machines have had an enormous impact on human societies. Examining Southeast Asian history by looking at how various everyday technologies have been adopted and utilized can lead to fascinating insights.
This is the topic we covered in this week of the seminar. The reading list is below.
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: Print, Fashion & Gender (Week 6)
In the 1920s and 1930s there was an explosion of print publications across Southeast Asia. These sources are invaluable for understanding many topics.
While early examinations of these writings sought to understand the rise of nationalism, current scholarship has moved on to such topics as fashion and gender, topics which are still related to nationalism, but which allow us to think about how people in Southeast Asian societies “refashioned” their sense of selves in ever more complex ways.
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: Transforming Siam (Week 5)
This week in the seminar we read about the transformation of Siam in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This included examining the complex and fascinating topic of Siam’s condition of being “not entirely not colonized” while also being to some extent “imperial.”
This video contains some information about this topic, and the readings from this week are below.
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: Colonizing Animals (Week 4)
This week in the seminar we read some of the scholarship of Jonathan Saha, an historian at the University of Leeds in the UK.
While I discuss his scholarship in the video, it is also important to note that Jonathan maintains a wonderful “online presence” through his blog, Colonizing Animals.
Here are the articles that we read:
Seminar in Modern Southeast Asian History: Thinking Big (Week 3)
This week in the seminar we looked at “big history,” that is, history that is large in scope, be that temporal (i.e., looking at a society over the longue durée) or spatial (looking comparatively at a topic across a large geographic area).
The most famous work on Southeast Asian history that falls into this category is undoubtedly Victor Lieberman’s, Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800–1830, a work that examines the trend toward state centralization in Southeast Asia over a long period of time, and then places that history in a global context.
Strange Parallels, is thus “big” in its examination of the past at both the temporal and spatial levels.
I’ve assigned Strange Parallels in seminars before, but this time we decided to look at a series of articles that take a “big” approach to the past in various ways by another scholar, historian Eric Tagliacozzo of Cornell University. My intent here was to try to give students a sense of not only what different forms of “big” history can look like, but to also give a sense of what “big” scholarly output looks like as well, as Tagliacozzo has been extremely productive, and in the academic world that is important.
Modern Southeast Asian History Seminar: Water (Week 2)
This is a video summary of a weekly seminar that I am teaching (Fall 2017) on modern Southeast Asian History.
The readings from this week are listed below.
Peter Boomgaard, ed., A World of Water: Rain, Rivers and Seas in Southeast Asian Histories (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007).
Jonathan Rigg, ed., The Gift of Water: Water Management, Cosmology and the State in South East Asia (London: School of Oriental and African Studies, 1992).
Lindsay Lloyd-Smith, Eric Tagliacozzo, “Water in Southeast Asia: Navigating Contradictions,” Trans –Regional and –National Studies of Southeast Asia Vol. 4, No. 2 (2016): 229-238.
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