News

Cheryl Yin is joining the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies as a UC Berkeley Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Yin received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Michigan, with a dissertation on Khmer honorifics. She is from Long Beach, California and received her undergraduate degree from Pitzer College.

CSEAS is now hosting the website for the Filipinx and Philippine Studies Working Group. The working group offers an intellectual space on campus for graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty to discuss new and critical scholarship on the Philippines and the diaspora. It receives funding support from the Townsend Center for the Humanities. 

CSEAS awarded Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for Summer 2021 to UC Berkeley graduate students Sean Cronan (History), Christian Gilberti (South & Southeast Asian Studies), Kirt Mausert (Anthropology), and Oren Samet-Marram (Political Science) to study Burmese. CSEAS also awarded FLAS fellowships to UC Santa Cruz graduate students Wayne Huang (Anthropology) to study Indonesian and Philip Conklin (History of Consciousness) to study Filipino.

CSEAS is a founding member of the recently-established Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asian Studies (GETSEA) consortium. The consortium was awarded a grant by the Henry Luce Foundation through its Luce Initiative on Southeast Asia (LuceSEA) with the mission of enhancing graduate education in Southeast Asian Studies across North America.

Founded in 1970, the South/Southeast Library (S/SEAL) is a dedicated reading room in Doe Library, UC Berkeley’s main research library. The library combines research and writing space, reference materials, and specialist consultation on site. It is a campus hub for multidisciplinary research and teaching in South and Southeast Asian studies, covering nineteen countries and over twenty indigenous languages.

CSEAS core faculty Prof. Penny Edwards (South & Southeast Asian Studies) has received the Carol D. Soc Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award for Late Career Faculty. The campus-wide award recognizes faculty for outstanding mentorship of graduate students at UC Berkeley. Prof. Edwards will be recognized at a virtual award ceremony this spring.

CSEAS hosted the online symposium Scholar-Activism and the Myanmar Resistance on March 9. During this event, scholar-activists analyzed and strategized for resistance to Myanmar’s military coup. The event included two panels [online] and a virtual exhibit [posted to the CSEAS YouTube channel].

Panel 1: Insights from Comparative Contexts

The longstanding CSEAS Facebook page has become corrupted and is no longer accessible by the center's administrators.  CSEAS has re-set its homepage Facebook link to go instead to the main Institute of East Asian Studies Facebook page. Apologies to those who were using our CSEAS Facebook feed for events information!

A joint conference organized by CSEAS and UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies that was originally planned to be held at UCLA in April 2020 was held online during the week of February 8, 2021. The conference, Ethnic and Community Identity in Southeast Asia, was designed to explore aspects of group and individual identity in Southeast Asia, and examine newly emerging forms of identity as well as long-existing ones that are being reconceptualized or reasserted in new circumstances. The keynote address, by Prof.

CSEAS has awarded Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for the 2020-21 academic year to Alan Yeh (French) to study Vietnamese, and to three incoming graduate students: Christian Gilberti (South & Southeast Asian Studies) will study Burmese and Daniel Owen (South & Southeast Asian Studies) and Jennifer Silver (Anthropology) will study Indonesian. Rose Marie Schweis (South & Southeast Asian Studies) received an undergraduate FLAS award to study Thai.

Prof. Nancy Lee Peluso is the new Chair of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies, following Prof. Aihwa Ong who served as interim chair for 2019-20. Prof. Peluso will serve as CSEAS Chair until June 30, 2024.

CSEAS awarded Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowships for Summer 2020 to Melissa Carlson (South & Southeast Asian Studies) to study Burmese, Jocelyn Duffy (Journalism) to study Filipino, Ngoc Mai Phan (Ethnic Studies) to study Vietnamese, and Justin Weinstock (Anthropology) to study Thai. Because of the travel restrictions imposed in the spring in response to the COVID19 pandemic, the FLAS recipients who had planned to study their languages in Southeast Asia had to change their plans.

CSEAS affiliated faculty Prof. Khatharya Um has received this year's Chancellor's Award for Advancing Institutional Excellence and Equity, presented to a UC Berkeley faculty member who has "an extraordinary record of accomplishment in advancing equity, inclusion and diversity through their scholarship, research, teaching, and public or univers

UCLA’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the consortium partner with CSEAS as a Title VI-funded National Resource Center for Southeast Asia, recently posted two articles about the ongoing collaboration between the two campuses in offering Distance Learning Khmer and Distance Learning Burmese.

UC Berkeley’s Office of Resources for International and Area Studies (ORIAS) has been hosting a regular series of online presentations for K-14 educators about world responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. A presentation in early April, by Prof. Siddharth Chandra from Michigan State University, covered the 1918 flu pandemic in India and Indonesia, which saw high death rates and waves of transmission.

Lisandro Claudio has recently joined the UC Berkeley faculty as Assistant Professor of South & Southeast Asian Studies. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Melbourne. He was on the faculty of De La Salle University in Manila prior to his move to Berkeley. His research focus is on modern history and political change in Southeast Asia, specifically in the Philippines.

Mu Sochua gave a CSEAS-sponsored talk on campus on October 30 on the role of women in Cambodian politics. Sochua is the Vice-President of the Cambodia National Rescue Party (CNRP) in charge of Foreign Affairs and Public Relations. Formerly, she served as Minister of Women and Veterans' Affairs in Cambodia’s coalition government from 1998 to 2004, and was also a member of Cambodia’s National Assembly, representing Battambang. Sochua left Cambodia in 2017 following a crackdown on opposition leaders and civil society, and the forcible dissolution of CNRP by the Hun Sen government.

CSEAS core faculty Prof. Nancy Lee Peluso (Environmental Science, Policy & Management) is the 2019 recipient of the Al Moumin Award in Environmental Peacebuilding, awarded by the Environmental Peacebuilding Association, UN Environment, American University’s School of International Service, and the Environmental Law Institute.

CSEAS has awarded Foreign Languages and Area Studies (FLAS) graduate student fellowships for the 2019-20 academic year to Jennifer Duque (Ethnic Studies) and Aaron Gatdula (City & Regional Planning) to study Filipino, Ngoc-Mai Phan (Ethnic Studies) to study Vietnamese, and Justin Weinstock (Anthropology) to study Thai. Chyrylle Digsay (South & Southeast Asian Studies and Legal Studies) received an undergraduate FLAS award to study Filipino.

UC Berkeley's Department of Anthropology has announced a new faculty hire effective July 2019. Dr. Daena Funahashi is a medical anthropologist who studies mental health, sacrifice and addiction in Finland and Thailand. She received her Ph.D in Anthropology from Cornell University. Before joining the Berkeley faculty, she was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Aarhus University in Denmark.