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  History
Scholars from UC Berkeley have undertaken research in Southeast Asia since the early 1900s. A number of prominent Berkeley faculty worked in the Philippines during the initial decades of the American occupation. Robert Gordon Sproul, who was to become a UC Berkeley Chancellor, was administrator for the public education system in the Philippines in the 1920s. Alfred Kroeber, the pioneering American ethnographer, worked in the Philippines and published a short monograph on the peoples of the islands. Art historian Lawrence Briggs, who worked on Cambodia, taught at Berkeley in the 1930s.
The formation of a formal Southeast Asia studies program at Berkeley did not take place however until World War II, when the university was designated as a special training venue for intelligence officers headed for the Pacific. In addition to East Asian language and culture studies, Berkeley faculty and staff were also recruited to focus on Southeast Asia. It was during the war that Indonesian, Thai and Vietnamese were first taught at on campus. Vietnamese would not be taught again until 1991, but Thai and Indonesian continued to be offered over the years on an intermittent basis.
In 1959 the Ford Foundation extended institutional grants to several major American research universities to promote international studies. The Center for Southeast Asia Studies was established in 1960, in part because of this support, later merging with the Center for South Asia Studies in 1969. The Center for Southeast Asia Studies re-established its institutional independence in 1990.
National Resource Center
In 2000, the Center for Southeast Asia Studies joined with the Center for Southeast Asia Studies at University of California, Los Angeles as a consortium to become a new U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center for Southeast Asian Studies. As a joint center, UCLA and UC Berkeley form one of only seven Title VI National Resource Centers for Southeast Asia in the U.S., and the only such center in California.
The UC Berkeley-UCLA consortium helps students and faculty at each campus collaborate on particular programs (conferences, workshops, and speaker series), furthers the development of campus resources devoted to the field (in the area of library acquisitions, e.g.) and promotes improvements in the quality and accessibility of language instruction.
Consortium activities of particular impact include the Distinguished Visitor from Southeast Asia program that brings prominent figures from Southeast Asia to both campuses for short residencies during the academic year. Past Distinguished Visitors include Chandra Muzaffar (2001), Nurcholish Madjid (2002), Juree Vichit-Vadakan (2003), Pham Thi Hoai (2004), Roland Tolentino (2006) and Zainah Anwar (2007).
The consortium also held joint conferences in 2008 ("Ten Years After: Reformasi and New Social Movements in Indonesia, 1998-2008") at UC Berkeley and 2009 ("Languages of Southeast Asia") at UCLA, and joint symposia on Islam in Southeast Asia in 2003 and 2006.
One other aspect supporting Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley and at UCLA is the extensive and integrated UC library system. UC Berkeley’s South/Southeast Asian Library (S/SEAL) holds one of the strongest Southeast Asian collections in the country. The library’s special collections on Southeast Asia include the Barrows collection on the Philippines; the Briggs collection on Indonesia, Indochina, and the Malay Peninsula; and the McFarland archive on Thailand and Cambodia. The library also holds other invaluable materials on the Philippines collected by R. F. Barton, Alfred Kroeber, and Bernard Moses in the first half of the twentieth century.
Other special interest holdings are the John Spragens Collection and the Beatrice and William Eisman Collection. The Spragens collection contains fiction, poetry and memoirs from North and South Vietnam. Beatrice and William Eisman were the co-founders of the US/Vietnam Friendship Association, and their collection includes photographs and print materials on the Vietnam War and on U.S. anti-war groups.
UCLA’s library has been building its collection of Southeast Asian materials in both English and vernacular languages since 1999, and now has a wide range of titles in its holdings of print and non-print materials.
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