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CSEAS:
Updates
Center for Khmer Studies MOU
CSEAS signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) in Cambodia in spring 2009. The agreement supports the development of collaborative projects and encourages cross-visits by faculty and students between CSEAS and CKS for research purposes. Founded in 1999, CKS is the only Southeast Asia-based member institution of the Council of American Overseas Research Centers.
New program on Islam and new media
“Islam Today: New Media and Youth Culture in the Middle East, South Asia and Southeast Asia” is a new collaborative program being organized by CSEAS with the Centers for Middle Eastern Studies and South Asia Studies for 2009-2010. It is funded by the Social Science Research Council as part of their Islam and Muslims in World Contexts project, being one of the few proposals selected for funding this year in a competitive, nationwide grant process.
The first event, a Forum on New Media and Politics in the Muslim World, takes place in October 2009, with speakers including Mohamed Abdel Dayem from the Committee to Protect Journalists; Nik Nazmi Nik Ahmad, a member of Malaysia’s opposition party KeAdilan Rakyat and a recently elected member of Selangor’s State Assembly; Muhamad Ali, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at UC Riverside; Huma Yusuf, a freelance journalist in Pakistan with a special interest in new media and political activism; and Haroon Mughal, a popular U.S.-based blogger on issues concerning South Asia and Muslim Americans. The forum will be moderated by Wajahat Ali, Associate Editor of altmuslim.com. Later events will include a forum on Muslim youth and social networking, to be held in February 2010; and a festival celebrating Muslim youth and the arts, to be held in April 2010. http://islamtoday.berkeley.edu
New Thai language instructor
Following the retirement of Dr. Susan Kepner this past spring, the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley has hired Ms. Supatra Chowchuvech to teach Intermediate Thai on campus for the 2009-2010 academic year.
Supatra has taught at the Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and most recently was principal Thai language instructor at the Wat Buddhanusorn Temple Thai Language School in Fremont CA. She is also active as an interpreter and translator, and is co-author of Thailand Fever (Paiboon, 2004), a book that explores cross-cultural issues between Westerners and Thais. Her undergraduate degree is from Chulalongkorn University. She has a masters degree in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania.
Distance Learning in Khmer and Tagalog
Advanced Filipino/Tagalog and Intermediate Khmer are being offered as a Distance Learning courses from Berkeley in 2009-2010, with funding support from CSEAS. The languages are taught by instructors Dr. Joi Barrios (Tagalog) and Frank Smith (Khmer) from UC Berkeley, and broadcast by live videoconferencing to UCLA. The UCLA students meet during the same class time as the Berkeley class and, via the videocast, see the Berkeley instructor and students and interact directly with the class, as if they were in the actual Berkeley classroom. The courses meet on a different calendar from Berkeley’s, because of UCLA’s quarter system, and start in late September when UCLA’s fall quarter begins.
These kinds of pilot programs in Distance Learning are being developed as possible solutions to emerging university difficulties to maintain funding and enrollments for courses offered for less-commonly taught languages. As technology improves, this method of instruction may be one way to broaden and maintain course listings for the lower-profile languages taught at different campuses in the University of California system.
Indochina archive closed
The Indochina Center, long managed by CSEAS, was finally closed in September 2009 with the transfer of remaining archival materials to the Vietnam Center and Archive at Texas Tech University. This archive was originally established at Berkeley by former Foreign Service officer Douglas Pike in the 1980s.
GRADUATE STUDENTS
The following graduate students received Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) fellowship awards for 2009-2010:
Khmer: Deborah Cheng
Tagalog: Marilola Perez, Heidi Tuason
Thai: Ellen Avis
Vietnamese: Matthew Berry, Jalel Sager
Recent Ph.D. Dissertations
Agricultural & Resource Economics
Jules Elkins, “Is industrialization bad for your health? Industrial growth in Indonesia”, 2008
Anthropology
Jerome Whitington, “The simulation of politics: Developmental natures in Lao hydropower”, 2008
Architecture
Jiat-Hwee Chang, “A genealogy of tropical architecture: Singapore in the British (post) colonial networks of nature, technoscience and governmentality, 1830s to 1960s”, 2009
Assistant professor, National University of Singapore
Comparative Literature
Ben Tran, “The politics of Vietnamese romanticism and literary history”, 2009
Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Vanderbilt University
English
Marguerite Nguyen, “Vietnamese-American encounters: Race, power, and literary innovation”, 2008
Postdoctoral Fellow, Tulane University
History
Kevin Sheehan, “Iberian Asia: The strategies of Spanish and Portuguese empire building, 1540-1700”, 2008
Collections Manager, Maritime Museum of San Diego
Leslie Woodhouse, “A ‘foreign’ princess in the Siamese court: Princess Dara Rasami, the politics of gender and ethnic identity in nineteenth-century Siam”, 2009
Medical Anthropology
Karen Greene, “A right life or the education of Soksabbay Sok: Child rights, abandonment, and governmentalized care in the Royal Kingdom of Kampuchea” 2007
Visiting Fellow, ANU Research School of Humanities
Political Science
Justin Hastings, “The political geography of clandestine transnational organizations in Southeast Asia”, 2008
Assistant Professor, Sam Nunn School of International Affairs, Georgia Tech University
Social Welfare
Yukyung Chung, “Transnational welfare: Filipinas in South Korea”, 2008 |
