Highlights for the 2024-2025 Academic Year

The life of the Council on Southeast Asia Studies is in the people who teach our classes, carry out research and advocacy, and participate in our many events. This year we are excited to be conducting an international search to hire a Tagalog/Filipino language lector, which will allow us to fulfil a long-held hope to expand Yale’s presence in the study of the Philippines. Many thanks are due to the students in Kasama, Yale’s Filipinx organization, for their hard work demonstrating the depth of student support for this position! The Department of Anthropology also recently announced that they have hired Piphal Heng, a world-renowned archaeologist of Angkor, who will join Yale in Fall 2025. CSEAS is also excited to welcome Aurélie Vialette, a new tenured associate professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese who is currently writing a book about and teaching a graduate seminar this Fall on penal colonies in the 19^th-century Philippines. At the Yale University Art Gallery, Arielle Winnick has also been appointed Donna Torrance Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art.

In addition to our many lectures and events, we are also pleased to be hosting numerous postdocs and visiting scholars. For the academic year, we are hosting two Fulbright-sponsored Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs): Agus Ferani Istiharoh, who goes by Fera, will be assisting with Indonesian Language courses; and Mỹ Kiệt, who also goes by Mia, will be assisting with Vietnamese. We also continue to host post-doctoral scholars Yin Yin Win and David Moe, as well as other scholars working at the cutting edge of Myanmar Studies. During Fall 2024, Professor Hang Truong, the head of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Social Sciences and Humanities at Vietnam National University in Ho Chi Minh City will be spending three months at Yale. Dr. Phi Nguyen, who recently received a PhD at the Lab of Urbanism at EDAR, EPFL, and the Geneva School of Art and Design (HEAD-Genève), Switzerland, will be spending two years as a postdoctoral fellow with us, sponsored by a prestigious award from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

CSEAS also mourns the loss of James C. Scott and Robert H. Barnes. A beautiful memorial to Professor Barnes was held on Friday August 23^rd, at the New Haven Lawn Club. During Connecticut’s apple harvest, CSEAS will be joining with the program on Agrarian Studies and other Yale Units to host a university-wide memorial to Professor Scott on October 7^th, to be held at the Yale Farm. We will also host a panel discussion focusing on his contributions to Southeast Asian Studies at noon on October 9^th in Luce Hall. Generations of Southeast Asianists at Yale have benefitted from the teaching and mentorship of Professor Scott, and it seems fitting to close this update with the words of one former student, Professor John T. Sidel, B.A., M.A. ’88, who calls upon us all to build on Jim’s legacy for the future of Southeast Asia Studies:
 

… let us try to honour Jim Scott through our scholarship and our study of Southeast Asia, and through the spirit in which we engage with our students, our colleagues, and all those whom we encounter across the region. As we plough our individual furrows and as we slash-and-burn and shift to new fields of inquiry within and beyond Southeast Asia, let us try to proceed with the humility, empathy, curiosity, and playful irreverence with which Jim Scott gave and shared so generously of himself over the long years of his extraordinarily productive life as a scholar of the region and so much more.