New Books in Southeast Asian Studies
Episodes
Jean Debernardi, "Christian Circulations: Global Christianity and the Local Church in Penang and Singapore, 1819-2000" (NUS Press, 2020)
10 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Jean DeBernardi, professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta, has written an outstanding account of the evolution of evangelical protestant...
Rethinking Rural Livelihoods and Food Security in Myanmar with Assistant Professor Mark Vicol
04 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After decades of economic and political isolation, Myanmar’s rural economy is rapidly shifting from a narrow reliance on low-productivity agricultur...
Alan Klima, "Ethnography #9" (Duke UP, 2019)
03 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Alan Klima’s Ethnography #9 (Duke University Press, 2019) was co-written by a ghost. And that’s just the start of what’s going on in this eeri...
Duncan McCargo, "Fighting for Virtue: Justice and Politics in Thailand" (Cornell UP, 2020)
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Anyone who has taken any interest in the politics of Thailand at all in the last two decades could not help but have noticed the part that the country...
A Thai Contemporary Artist on Identity, Power, and the Space In-Between: A Discussion with Phaptawan Suwannakudt
25 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As a Thai-Australian woman artist, Phaptawan Suwannakudt has long battled prejudice and discrimination relating to her gender. This disappointment wit...
Decolonising Conservation Practices and Research: Seeing the Orangutan in Borneo with Dr June Rubis
18 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Around the world, orangutans are widely recognised as an iconic species for environmental and wildlife conservation efforts. The rainforest in the Mal...
Lynette J. Chua, "The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life" (Stanford UP, 2018)
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Politics of Love in Myanmar: LGBT Mobilization and Human Rights as a Way of Life (Stanford UP, 2018) offers an intimate ethnographic account of a...
Combating African Swine Fever in Timor-Leste with Associate Professor Paul Hick
11 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Since it first arrived in Asia in 2018, African swine fever virus has caused a devastating pandemic resulting in more than a quarter of the global pig...
Teren Sevea, "Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
10 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya (Cambridge UP, 2020), Teren Sevea reveals the economic, environmental an...
Reducing Poverty through Digital Finance Schemes in Myanmar: A Discussion with Dr Russell Toth
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Financial inclusion has been one of the most prominent issues on the international development agenda in recent years, as access to payments, remittan...
Olga Dror, "Making Two Vietnams: War and Youth Identities, 1965-1975" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
We are familiar with the history of the division of Vietnam in 1954 into two states, the Democratic Republic of Vietnam in the north and the Republic ...
P. Chachavalpongpun, "Coup, King, Crisis: A Critical Interregnum in Thailand" (Yale SEA Studies, 2020)
27 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There are many Orientalist stereotypes about Thailand. Known as the “Land of Smiles” to foreign tourists, they often comment on the calm and pleas...
A. Pohlman et al., "The International People’s Tribunal for 1965 and the Indonesian Genocide" (Routledge, 2019)
25 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How do you hold a government accountable for crimes it refuses to acknowledge? Today's book, The International People's Tribunal for 1965 and the I...
A. M. Thawnghmung, "Everyday Economic Survival in Myanmar" (U Wisconsin Press, 2019)
22 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Reforms in Myanmar (formerly Burma) have eased restrictions on citizens' political activities. Yet for most Burmese, Ardeth Maung Thawnghmung shows in...
Jonathan Padwe, "Disturbed Forests, Fragmented Memories: Jarai and Other Lives in the Cambodian Highlands" (U Washington Press, 2020)
15 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cambodia’s troubled history has often been depicted in terms of conflict, trauma and tussles between great powers. In Disturbed Forests, Fragmented...
B. J. Tria Kerkvliet, "Speaking Out in Vietnam: Public Political Criticism in a Communist Party-Ruled Nation" (Cornell UP, 2019)
31 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Since 1990 public political criticism has evolved into a prominent feature of Vietnam's political landscape. Over the last three decades, such critici...
Courtney Bruntz and Brooke Schedneck, "Buddhist Tourism in Asia" (U Hawaii Press, 2020)
22 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This edited volume is the first book-length study of Buddhist tourism in contemporary Asia in the English language. Featuring chapters from diverse co...
Enze Han, "Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building Between China and Southeast Asia" (Oxford UP, 2019)
21 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Asymmetrical Neighbors: Borderland State-Building Between China and Southeast Asia (Oxford UP, 2019) explains the variations in state building across...
Ben Bland, "Man of Contradictions: Joko Widodo and the Struggle to Remake Indonesia" (Penguin, 2021)
21 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Joko Widodo, or “Jokowi”, as he is popularly known, famously rose from a riverside shack to become president of Indonesia in 2014. In a country be...
COVID-19 and Migrant Workers in Southeast Asia: A Discussion with Emeritus Professor Philip Hirsch
17 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
COVID-19 has had such far-reaching impacts that it can be, and has been, studied from the perspective of almost any academic discipline. For geographe...
Beating Plastic Pollution in Timor-Leste with Professor Thomas Maschmeyer
10 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As environmental emergencies go, the explosion of plastic waste is right up there. With global plastic production exceeding 300 million tonnes each ye...
Jack Meng-Tat Chia, "Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea" (Oxford UP, 2020)
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford University Press 2020) is the first monograph in the English language to e...
Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz, "Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912" (Columbia UP, 2020)
09 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Philippine Revolution of 1896-1905, which began against Spain and continued against the United States, took place in the context of imperial subju...
Transforming Breast Cancer Diagnosis in Vietnam: A Discussion with Professor Patrick Brennan
03 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Globally, breast cancer is the most commonly diagnosed cancer in women, with over 1 million cases detected annually. The disease is particularly worri...
Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village with Associate Professor Holly High
25 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her latest book, Projectland: Life in a Lao Socialist Model Village (University of Hawaii Press), due out in May 2021, Associate Professor Holly...
Sebastian Strangio, "In the Dragon's Shadow: Southeast Asia in the Chinese Century" (Yale UP, 2020)
23 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries Southeast Asia has enjoyed a relatively pleasant relationship with China, its massive neighbor to the north. While Chinese merchants and...
Michael D. Barr, "Singapore: A Modern History" (Bloomsbury, 2018)
20 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Singapore’s history has generally been represented through a linear, upward trajectory “from Third World to the First,” in the words of the post...
Social Media, Grassroots Activism and Disinformation in Southeast Asia: A Discussion with Dr Aim Sinpeng and Dr Ross Tapsell
19 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Social media has become a crucial avenue for political discourse in Southeast Asia, given its potential as a “liberation technology” in both democ...
Nurfadzilah Yahaya, "Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia" (Cornell UP, 2020)
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Fluid Jurisdictions: Colonial Law and Arabs in Southeast Asia (Cornell University Press, 2020) by Prof. Nurfadzilah Yahaya is a wide-ranging, geograph...
Southeast Asian Performance, Ethnic Identity and China’s Soft Power: A Discussion with Dr Josh Stenberg
12 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
From glove puppets of Chinese origin and Hakka religious processions, to wartime political theatre and contemporary choirs and dance groups, the diver...
Improving Food Security in Laos and Cambodia: A Farmer’s Perspective with Associate Professor Russell Bush
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Southeast Asia's demand for protein in the form of animal meat is increasing by more than 4% every year. This has important consequences for regional ...
Jana K. Lipman, "In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers, and Repatriates" (U California Press, 2020)
30 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Camps: Vietnamese Refugees, Asylum Seekers and Repatriates (University of California Press, 2020) is an in-depth study of the fate of the nearly 80...
Myanmar’s Disciplined Democracy and the 2020 Elections: A Discussion with Dr Roger Lee Huang
29 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Myanmar is scheduled to hold general elections in November 2020. While the country has experienced political liberalisation since 2011, the latest Fre...
Gregory Forth, "A Dog Pissing at the Edge of a Path: Animal Metaphors in an Eastern Indonesian Society" (McGill-Queen’s UP, 2019)
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Gregory Forth, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Alberta and Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, has studied the Nage people ...
Lost Temples of the Jungle: A History of Mrauk-U with Dr. Bob Hudson
22 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Deep in the jungles of Myanmar lie the remains of an ancient kingdom, the 15th-century royal city of Mrauk-U. Located in the Bay of Bengal and separat...
Melissa Crouch, "The Constitution of Myanmar: A Contextual Analysis" (Hart, 2019)
20 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The tail end of the twentieth century was a good time for constitutional lawyers. Leapfrogging around the globe, they offered advice on how to amend, ...
The Street and the Ballot Box: How Indonesia’s Labour Movement Rose from the Ashes-Professor Michele Ford
15 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Indonesia’s labour movement emerged weak and disorganised after more than 30 years under authoritarian rule. Yet in the two decades since the countr...
Christopher Capozzola, "Bound By War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’s First Pacific Century" (Basic Books, 2020)
06 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ever since American troops occupied the Philippines in 1898, generations of Filipinos have served in and alongside the U.S. armed forces. In Bound By ...
Ronit Ricci, "Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
28 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Lanka, Ceylon, Sarandib: merely three disparate names for a single island? Perhaps. Yet the three diverge in the historical echoes, literary cultures,...
S. Lawreniuk and L. Parsons, "Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality" (Oxford UP, 2020)
22 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Going Nowhere Fast: Mobile Inequality in the Age of Translocality (Oxford UP, 2020) brings together more than a decade’s worth of research during on...
Brian Eyler, "Last Days of the Mighty Mekong" (Zed Book, 2019)
21 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Mekong River is one of the world’s great rivers. From its source in the Qinghai-Tibetan plateau it snakes down through southern China and then b...
Kris Alexanderson, "Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
14 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Subversive Seas: Anticolonial Networks across the Twentieth-Century Dutch Empire (Cambridge UP, 2019), Kris Alexanderson offers a revealing portrai...
Alicia Turner, "The Irish Buddhist: The Forgotten Monk Who Faced Down the British Empire" (Oxford UP, 2020)
31 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Buddhism has always been a world religion, but its popularity in the West really dates only from the late nineteenth century, when much of the Buddhis...
Ravi Palat, "The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650" (Palgrave, 2015)
19 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ravi Palat’s The Making of an Indian Ocean World-Economy, 1250–1650: Princes, Paddy fields, and Bazaars (Palgrave, 2015) counters eurocentric noti...
Roman David and Ian Holliday, "Liberalism and Democracy in Myanmar" (Oxford UP, 2018)
17 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Democracy is a popular topic among scholars of politics in Southeast Asia. Liberalism is not. Or at least it hadn’t been up until the last few years...
Leah Zani, "Bomb Children: Life in the Former Battlefields of Laos" (Duke UP, 2019)
05 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, I talk with Dr. Leah Zani, a public anthropologist and poet based in California, about her truly wonderful book Bomb Children: Life i...
Edward Alpers, "The Indian Ocean in World History" (Oxford UP, 2014)
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Edward Alpers’s The Indian Ocean in World History (Oxford University Press, 2014) is a concise yet an immensely informative introduction to the Indi...
Angela S. Chiu, "The Buddha in Lanna: Art, Lineage, Power, and Place in Northern Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2017)
20 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For centuries, wherever Thai Buddhists have made their homes, statues of the Buddha have provided striking testament to the role of Buddhism in the li...
Vincent Bevins, "The Jakarta Method" (Public Affairs, 2020)
01 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Why did the word “Jakarta” appear as graffiti on the streets of Santiago in 1973? Why did left-wing Chilean activists receive postcards in the mai...
Kevin W. Fogg, "Indonesia’s Islamic Revolution" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As Indonesia nears the 75th anniversary of its proclamation of independence this year, the socio-political debates surrounding her birth as a nation-s...
John Roosa, "Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia" (U Wisconsin Press, 2020)
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On the night of September 30/October 1, 1965, a bungled coup d’état resulted in the deaths of a handful of Indonesian generals and a young girl. Wi...
Brian Greene, "Until the End of Time: Mind, Matter, and Our Search for Meaning in an Evolving Universe" (Random House, 2020)
02 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Brian Greene is a Professor of Mathematics and Physics at Columbia University in the City of New York, where he is the Director of the Institute for S...
Chiara Formichi, "Islam and Asia: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2020)
30 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Challenging the geographical narrative of the history of Islam, Chiara Formichi’s new book Islam and Asia: A History (Cambridge University Press, 20...
Viet Thanh Nguyen, "Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War" (Harvard UP, 2016)
28 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
According to Viet Thanh Nguyen, all wars are fought twice: first on the field of battle, and then in the struggles over memory. In Nothing Ever Dies: ...
Wasana Wongsurawat, "The Crown and the Capitalists: The Ethnic Chinese and the Founding of the Thai Nation" (U Washington Press, 2019)
18 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
One can’t understand modern Thailand without understanding the role of the ethnic Chinese. And one can’t understand the role of the ethnic Chinese...
Laurence Monnais, "The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals: Medicines and Modernity in Vietnam" (Cambridge UP, 2019)
04 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Situated at the crossroads between the history of colonialism, of modern Southeast Asia, and of medical pluralism, this history of medicine and health...
Leslie M. Harris, "Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies" (U Georgia Press, 2019)
28 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies (University of Georgia Press, 2019), edited by Leslie M. Harris, James T. Campbell, and Alfred L. B...
Sara E. Davies, "Containing Contagion: The Politics of Disease Outbreaks in Southeast Asia" (Johns Hopkins UP, 2019)
15 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
At the start of 2020 few of us would have recognized the face of the current director general of the World Health Organization. Three months later, an...
Marco Z. Garrido, "The Patchwork City: Class, Space and Politics in Metro Manila" (U Chicago Press, 2019)
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In contemporary Manila, slums and squatter settlements are peppered throughout the city, often pushing right up against the walled enclaves of the pri...
C. Baker and P. Phongpaichit, "From the Fifty Jātaka: Selections from the Thai Paññāsa Jātaka" (Silkworm Books, 2019)
02 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Jātaka tales, or stories of the Buddha’s previous lives as a bodhisatta, are included in the Pāli Canon and have for centuries been a rich sou...
Matt Cook, "Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy" (MIT Press, 2020)
30 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician's purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat....
Cosmopolitan Printing in a Hybrid Language: A Discussion of the Sino-Malay Literary Tradition (1870-1949) with Dr Tom Hoogervorst
18 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Indonesia is home to one of the world’s largest Chinese-descended populations. Their historical impact is often measured in economic terms but was e...
Sumit K. Mandal, "Becoming Arab: Creole Histories and Modern Identity in the Malay World" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
10 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the so-called war on terror we’ve become accustomed to racialized portrayals of the Arab as an inflexible and threatening other to th...
Jerome Whitington, "Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower" (Cornell UP, 2018)
06 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Jerome Whitington's Anthropogenic Rivers: The Production of Uncertainty in Lao Hydropower (Cornell University Press, 2019) examines the dynamics and d...
Sher Banu Khan, "Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699" (Cornell UP, 2018)
28 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In her book, Sovereign Women in a Muslim Kingdom: The Sultanahs of Aceh, 1641-1699 (Cornell University Press, 2018), Sher Banu Khan provides a rare an...
Phillipa Chong, “Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times” (Princeton UP, 2020)
25 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How does the world of book reviews work? In Inside the Critics’ Circle: Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times (Princeton University Press, 2020), Philli...
Christopher J. Shepherd, "Haunted Houses and Ghostly Encounters: Ethnography and Animism in East Timor, 1860-1975" (NIAS Press, 2019)
18 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Anyone who tries to understand the history, religion, and especially the “culture” of Southeast Asia, will soon encounter the phenomenon of animis...
Howard Jones, "My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness" (Oxford UP, 2017)
07 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In his book My Lai: Vietnam, 1968, and the Descent into Darkness (Oxford UP, 2017), Dr. Howard Jones describes how on March 16th, 1968, several units ...
Timothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942" (NUS Press, 2019)
07 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explor...
Ivan V. Small, "Currencies of Imagination: Channeling Money and Chasing Mobility in Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2018)
06 Feb 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Overseas Vietnamese are estimated to remit 15 billion dollars annually to family that remains in Vietnam. Ivan V. Small moves beyond the numbers to ex...
In the Aftermath of the Rohingya Genocide: Our Failure to Protect
31 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Despite the post-Holocaust UN convention to ensure the protection of minority communities globally, the International community has failed to notice t...
K. Linder et al., "Going Alt-Ac: A Guide to Alternative Academic Careers" (Stylus Publishing, 2020)
30 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
If you’re a grad student facing the ugly reality of finding a tenure-track job, you could easily be forgiven for thinking about a career change. How...
Taomo Zhou, “Migration in the Time of Revolution: China, Indonesia and the Cold War” (Cornell UP, 2019)
17 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
If tales of China’s radical ‘opening up’ to the world over the last 30 years imply that the country was somehow ‘closed’ before this, then o...
Victoria Reyes, "Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Violence, and Empire in Subic Bay, Philippines" (Stanford UP, 2019)
04 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Increasing levels of globalization have led to the proliferation of spaces of international exchange. In her new book, Global Borderlands: Fantasy, Vi...
Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information" (Norton, 2019)
03 Dec 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We’ve all heard that a picture is worth a thousand words, but what if we don’t understand what we’re looking at? Social media has made charts, i...
Michael G. Vann, "The Great Hanoi Rat Hunt: Empire, Disease, and Modernity in French Colonial Vietnam" (Oxford UP, 2018)
26 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
A funny thing happened to historian Michael Vann* on the way to his PhD thesis. While he was doing his research on French colonialism and the urbanist...
Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
25 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transn...
Pierre Asselin, "Vietnam’s American War: A History" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
18 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Do we need another book on the Vietnam War? Pierre Asselin, Dwight E. Stanford Chair in the History of US Foreign Relations at San Diego State Univers...
Claire Edington, "Beyond the Asylum: Mental Illness in French Colonial Vietnam" (Cornell UP, 2019)
13 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Both colonies and insane asylums are well known institutions of power. But what of asylums in Europe’s early 20th-century colonial empires? How did ...
Alicia Izharuddin, “Gender and Islam in Indonesian Cinema” (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017)
12 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Since the fall of the Indonesian New Order regime in 1998 there has been a steady rise of Islamic popular culture in the nation. Muslim consumers and ...
Alexander L. Hinton, "Man or Monster?: The Trial of a Khmer Rouge Torturer" (Duke UP, 2016)
04 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Can justice heal? Must there be justice in order to heal? Is there such a thing as justice, something to be striven for regardless of context? Alexa...
Kathryn Conrad on University Press Publishing
03 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
As you may know, university presses publish a lot of good books. In fact, they publish thousands of them every year. They are different from most trad...
Wang Gungwu, "Home is Not Here" (NUS Press, 2018)
01 Nov 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Wang Gungwu has long been recognized as a world authority on the history of China and the overseas Chinese. His work has been inspired by his own expe...
David Biggs, "Footprints of War: Militarized Landscapes in Vietnam" (U Washington Press, 2018)
31 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
By now we all know that Vietnam is a country, not a war. But how have decades, and even centuries, of war impacted the land of this southeast Asian na...
J. Neuhaus, "Geeky Pedagogy: A Guide for Intellectuals, Introverts, and Nerds Who Want to Be Effective Teachers" (West Virginia UP, 2019)
24 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The things that make people academics -- as deep fascination with some arcane subject, often bordering on obsession, and a comfort with the solitude t...
Erik Harms, "Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon" (U California Press, 2016)
22 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
What happens when market-oriented policy reforms butt heads with a single-party state’s strictly maintained limits on political freedoms? That quest...
Michitake Aso, "Rubber and the Making of Vietnam: An Ecological History, 1897-1975" (UNC Press, 2018)
11 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How can the history of rubber be used as a way to understand the history of 20th-century Vietnam? In this episode of New Books in History, Michael G. ...
Stephen Hamnett, "Planning Singapore: The Experimental City" (Routledge, 2019)
07 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we talk with Stephen Hamnett about Planning Singapore: The Experimental City(Routledge, 2019), a book he edited with Belinda Yuen. Tw...
Benjamin Tausig, "Bangkok is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint" (Oxford UP, 2019)
30 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The political protests of the “Red Shirts” movement in Thailand in April-May 2010 ended in tragedy, with the security forces killing over 90 peopl...
Nicholas Walton, "Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency" (Hurst, 2019)
27 Sep 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Nicholas Walton’s Singapore Singapura: From Miracle to Complacency (Hurst, 2019) is far more than a portrait of the rise of a resource-poor nation t...
Julia Cassaniti, "Remembering the Present: Mindfulness in Buddhist Asia" (Cornell UP, 2018)
12 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
How do you understand mindfulness? Is your understanding limited by your own culture’s definition of what mindfulness is? These are some of the ques...
Tyrell Haberkorn, "In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand" (U Wisconsin Press, 2018)
23 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the preface to In Plain Sight: Impunity and Human Rights in Thailand (University of Wisconsin Press, 2018) Tyrell Haberkorn asks, echoing Pakavadi ...
Chika Watanabe, "Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar" (U Hawaii Press, 2019)
15 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Chika Watanabe’s Becoming One: Religion, Development, and Environmentalism in a Japanese NGO in Myanmar (University of Hawaii Press, 2019) is a rich...
Ashley Thompson, "Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor" (Routledge, 2016)
04 Jul 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thanks to the international tourism industry most people are familiar with the spectacular ruins of Angkor, the great Cambodian empire that lasted fro...
Paul Thomas Chamberlin, "The Cold War's Killing Fields: Rethinking the Long Peace" (Harper, 2018)
13 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Paul Thomas Chamberlin has written a book about the Cold War that makes important claims about the nature and reasons for genocide in the last half of...
Long T. Bui, "Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory" (NYU Press, 2018)
07 Jun 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In Returns of War: South Vietnam and the Price of Refugee Memory (New York University Press, 2018), Long T. Bui examines the complicated relationship ...
Gregory V. Raymond, "Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation" (NIAS Press, 2018)
07 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Thailand is one of the world’s last remaining military dictatorships, and the last in Asia. While we are familiar with the Thai military’s frequen...
Ward Keeler, "The Traffic in Hierarchy: Masculinity and Its Others in Buddhist Burma" (U Hawaii Press, 2017)
01 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Michael Walzer once began a book with the advice of a former teacher to “always begin negatively”. Tell your readers what you are not going to do ...
Discussion of Massive Online Peer Review and Open Access Publishing
19 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the information age, knowledge is power. Hence, facilitating the access to knowledge to wider publics empowers citizens and makes societies more de...
Christopher Goscha, "Vietnam: A New History" (Basic Books, 2016)
26 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
More than forty year after its end the Vietnam War casts a long shadow over our understanding of Vietnam’s modern history. But the acute focus on th...