What's Up with Southeast Asian Studies at Stanford? Recap, Prospect, Controversy

The 2008-09 academic year was a busy time for the Southeast Asia Forum (SEAF). A dozen on-campus lectures by Southeast Asianists from Australia, Germany, Malaysia, Thailand, and the United States ranged from country-specific topics such as labor resistance in Vietnam, political opposition in Malaysia, and the 2009 elections in Indonesia, to broader-brush treatments of Southeast Asian identities and modernities, regional repercussions of the global economic slowdown, and the wellsprings of "late democratization" across East Asia.

SEAF scholar's book on Malaysian Islamism is published

Fall 2007 SEAF visiting scholar Joseph Liow's study of Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia has been published by Oxford University Press. Liow is an associate professor in the Rajaratnam School of International Studies at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He worked on completing the manuscript at Stanford. SEAF director Don Emmerson blurbed the book as "broad in coverage yet rich in detail, cautionary without being alarmist, [and] a cogent antidote to wishful thinking about religion, society, and the state, not only in Malaysia but in the wider Muslim world as well."

• » Oxford University Press: "Piety and Politics: Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia"

State of the art of the state?

Stanford University Press publishes SEAF-initiated book on Southeast Asia in Political Science

Stanford undergraduates pose questions for Singapore in Singapore Journal

The inaugural (March 2008) issue of PRISM, an undergraduate journal published by the University Scholars Programme (USP) of the National University of Singapore (NUS), carries a dozen essays. Six were written by Stanford undergraduates for a Stanford Overseas Seminar taught in Singapore in September 2006, and six by NUS undergrads in the USP for an NUS course taught at Stanford in May 2007.

Southeast Asian Studies at Stanford: A rising profile

Five Southeast Asia scholars are slated for residence at Stanford for the upcoming academic year. Shorenstein APARC and the Southeast Asia Forum will host four of them: three were selected under the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Initiative on Southeast Asia, and one is a recipient of a 2008-09 Shorenstein Postdoctoral Fellowship. A fifth scholar will be on campus as a National Fellow of the Hoover Institution.