Abhirada Komoot (PhD Candidate, University of Western Australia) and Do Truong Giang (Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences)

Abhirada Komoot will discuss The Phanom-Surin Shipwreck and Cultural Exchange between Mainland Southeast Asia and the wider Indian Ocean World, and Do Truong Giang will talk about Champa’s Long-distance Cultural Exchange: A View from Maritime Archaeology and History.

For the launch, we will introduce the project's parameters and goals, and will be in conversation with Pastor Roces, as she gives an overview of “what is out there” in overseas collections and why an aggregated inventory is needed to map this landscape of diasporic objects.

Rachel Harrison (SOAS), Laurence Goodchild (Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group), Cristina Martinez-Juan (SOAS)

In this launch event, we will have a conversation about publishing for SEAR in general and the Cordillera special issue in particular with Philippine studies conference organisers and participants.

Dominic Goodall (Pondicherry Centre of the EFEO)

All of us start with misconceptions about what Khmer inscriptions and art can tell us, and most find ourselves asking: Why is it so hard to marry iconographic and epigraphic data?

Salvador Santino F. Regilme Jr. (Leiden University)

Does foreign aid promote human rights? As the world’s largest aid donor, the United States has provided foreign assistance to more than 200 countries. This seminar presentation discusses the key arguments and findings from the forthcoming book Aid Imperium: United States Foreign Policy and Human Rights in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia.

Michael Falser (Heidelberg University/Technical University of Munich)

Michael Falser will take you on a journey, one that will give you the chance to see some of the results of his recent monograph Angkor Wat. A Transcultural History of Heritage (DeGruyter, Berlin 2020), which traced the multiple lives of Angkor Wat over a 150-year-long period from the 1860s to the 2010s, and presented for the first time a kind of visual anthology of the temple with more than 1,400 historic photographs, architectural plans and samples of public media.

François Molle (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement)

The Chao Phraya delta has been the historical heart of commercial rice production in Thailand since the Bowring Treaty (1855). In the early 1900s, it accounted for 70% of the country’s production and 100% of exports. What happened to this agrarian system in the following 100 years?

Prof Anne Booth (SOAS)

The main focus of the talk is to assess the economic impact of the COVID 19 pandemic across Southeast Asia, and explain the different outcomes by country and region.

Robert Lemelson (UCLA)

A film screening of Shadows & Illuminations. A film that follows an older Balinese man, Nyoman Kereta, as he struggles with the intrusion of spirits into his consciousness. Kereta says he has been living in two worlds, the world of his family and community and the world of the spirits, for the past 40 years.

Jos van Beurden (Researcher, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Hilmar Farid (Director General of Culture, Ministry of Education and Culture of Indonesia)

Jos van Beurden will present Lessons for the Future: Returns by the Netherlands to Indonesia in the 2010s and the 1970s, and Hilmar Farid will discuss The Future of Restitution: What is Possible?

Phacharaphorn Phanomvan (Lecturer, University of Oxford), Charlotte Galloway (Honorary Associate Professor, Australian National University)

Phacharaphorn Phanomvan will present Plai Bat: Reclaiming Heritage, Social Media, and Modern Nationalism and Charlotte Galloway will discuss Repatriation, Restitution and Myanmar. 

Dr. Sasa

The 6th SOAS Annual Philippine Studies Conference aims to bring together academics in the fields of the humanities and the social sciences, as well as artists, writers and performers that are based in the Visayas. The objective of the conference is to bring together key people in Visayan scholarship and cultural production and develop a body of discourse on Visayan cultural practices.

Prof Ramon Guillermo (University of the Philippines Diliman)

The lecture aims to demonstrate how methods from Digital Humanities can be used to deepen our understanding of the inner workings of the baybayin writing system.

This lecture series will explore what it means to decolonise the museum and curatorial practice in a Southeast Asian context. The speakers cover a range of topics, including the display of Buddhist and Hindu sculpture, ethnographic and colonial collections, curating contemporary art, and the use and exhibition of Southeast Asian material in western museums.

Stephen A. Murphy (Pratapaditya Pal Senior Lecturer in Curating and Museology of Asian Art, SOAS)

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series (1 of 6).

Pamela N. Corey (Fulbright University Vietnam) and Vera Mey (SOAS)

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series (2 of 6).

Conan Cheong and Faisal Husni (Assistant Curators for Southeast Asia, Asian Civilisations Museum)

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series (3 of 6).

Prof Myfel Paluga (University of the Philippines-Mindanao)

Dr Farouk Yahya (SOAS)

This special issue of the SOAS-based journal Indonesia and the Malay World gathers together the key works of the late Dr Russell Jones (1926–2019) on the paper used for copying Malay manuscripts and their watermarks.

Duyen Nguyen (SOAS)

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series (4 of 6).

Ricky Punzalan (University of Michigan)

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series (5 of 6).

Marieke Bloembergen (KITLV and Leiden University) and Mathilde Mechling (Independent Researcher)

This event is part of the Decolonising Curating and the Museum in Southeast Asia lecture series (6 of 6).

Dr Cheryll Ruth Soriano (De La Salle University, Manila)

High levels of engagement in politics are generally considered to be a sign of a healthy democracy, where the citizenry is empowered and interested in being involved in matters of the State. But is that always true? In the Philippines, where a third of the 61 million-strong electorates are from the 18-35 age bracket, and for whom social media is often considered as a news source despite widespread disinformation, the answer may not be so simple.

Theara Thun (Kyoto University)

Various Speakers

This conference will use the PechaKucha format to bring out the perceptions of China’s rise from countries that stretch from the eastern extremity of Asia, through the Middle East to the west coast of Africa.