News

If a war breaks out over Taiwan, Biden may be forced into a decision no American president since 1979 has wanted to make...[read more]

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.

Dear Friends,

Using approaches from sociology, political science, history, and literary and cultural studies, the contributors offer innovative and nuanced analyses of a wide range of topics from refugee displacement to street politics, from anti-communism and democracy to militarization. The collection begins with the national division in 1945 and devastating civil war and concludes with the May 18 Democratic Uprising in 1980.

For more information, and to order, go to:

Taiwan has long defended itself from political meddling, including disinformation, by the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Attempts to influence Taiwan’s domestic politics have increased in both intensity and severity following the election of Tsai Ing-wen in 2016, with Beijing continuing to target the basic underpinnings of Taiwan’s democratic system.

Vinod K. Aggarwal examines Taiwan’s efforts to diversify its trade policy away from China, particularly its focus on securing a bilateral free trade agreement with the United States.

IEAS has joined Project MUSE to offer our e-books to libraries and other institutions. The first two titles are now available and more will be added in the coming months. The e-books are accessible through institutional subscription.  

Japan America Student Conference Scholarships

Deadline: December 31, 2020

The Center for Japanese Studies grants full scholarships to the Japan-American Student Conference(link is external) for Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students. Awards are open to any full-time student with an interest in Japan.

Countless studies have shown that local officials are less responsive to ethnic minority citizens. Surprisingly, we find no similar pattern of discrimination by Taiwanese local officials. In an online contacting experiment, we send citizen service requests to the websites of 358 township and district chiefs, randomly varying the name of the putative citizen to reflect an indigenous or an ethnically Chinese identity and collecting data on officials' responses. We find that officials are equally responsive to both identities.

The Los Angeles Review of Books posted a review this week of our recently published book, What Is Korean Literature? by Professor Youngmin Kwon and Professor Bruce Fulton.

What Is Korean Literature? is available to purchase here.

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.