Professor Ashley Thompson delivers the Golay Memorial Lecture at Cornell University

Professor Ashley Thompson (Hiram W Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art) delivered the 13th Frank H. Golay Memorial Lecture on 6 November 2025.

The lecture, 'Restitution in the Making of Southeast Asia Today', explored how restitution of looted antiquities participates in identity formation at shifting scales across the Southeast Asian region, from the individual to the communal to the national to the regional to the international to the global to the cosmic.  The lecture argued that restitution processes carry a dual potential: on the one hand, to close down histories and borders, and and on the other, to effect visionary unification.

The Frank H. Golay Memorial Lecture at Cornell University invites leading scholars in Southeast Asian Studies to 'set the tone' for future work in the field.

Image: Post-lecture, Ashley Thompson meets with Cornell students Un Mutty and Zhixia Mo, Cornell University. Photo courtesy Zhixia Mo.