Highlights for the 2026-2027 Academic Year

Hello CSEAS Community!

The Council on Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS) warmly welcomes you to campus for the 2026-2027 Academic Year. We are excited to share the wide-range of resources Yale has for the study of Southeast Asia—we invite you to visit our library collections, explore the Southeast Asia-related collections in the Yale University Art Gallery, enjoy (or learn to play) our gamelan, and participate in our events. We also hope you will check out our courses, from world-class language instruction in Filipino (Tagalog), Indonesian, and Vietnamese to a range of undergraduate and undergraduate courses across the humanities and social sciences. 

Keep up with the most current scholarship about Southeast Asia by attending our brownbag lectures, which meet every Wednesday from noon to 1:20 pm in Luce Hall. The brownbags are also the best place to meet members of the Yale community who are interested in the region. 

In addition, we are hosting some exciting special events, including the Fall 2026 Coca-Cola lecture by Thant-Myint U on Thursday, Oct. 1. Throughout October, we will celebrate Filipino American History Month in the United States and Indigenous Peoples Month in the Philippines through a series of brown-bag talks on Philippines-related topics. Together with the MacMillan Center, we will also host a curated display of Philippine textiles on loan from the Philippine Consulate General in New York (PCG-NYC) and the Philippine Trade and Investment Center (PTIC). The exhibit will launch on October 2 with a talk by a Philippine textile expert, followed by a reception at Luce Hall. In the Spring semester, Fadzilah Yahaya is co-organizing a two-day symposium, “Imperial Blueprints: Water Infrastructures in Modern Asia,” that follow the dams, canals, hydropower plants and reclaimed lands of Asia from their colonial beginnings through postcolonial neglect into present crisis.

And of course, our program’s most important resource is the people who make it up. CSEAS is delighted to be hosting several faculty and scholars, who will be with us this year: 

• Vinh Quoc Nguyen, a scholar of history, literature and gender/queer studies, joins CSEAS this year as a Lector in Vietnamese
• Tommy Prabowo, is this year’s Fulbright Foreign Language Teaching Assistant for Indonesian
• ko ko thett, an award-winning poet, joins CSEAS as a Henry Hart Rice Lecturer
• Pau Sian Lian, a political scientist and practitioner specializing in federalism and ethnic conflict, and with expertise on Myanmar, joins CSEAS as Associate Research Scholar 
• Lucy Right, a political scientist who studies the effects of pluralism in local authoritarian institutions, with a particular focus on Cambodia, is continuing for a second year as a Postdoctoral Associate in Leitner Program in International and Comparative Political Economy
• Hisashi Shimojo, an Associate Professor from Kobe University, who studies the historical anthropology of Vietnam and Cambodia, will be with CSEAS until February, 2027
• Hui-Yuan Neo, a Postdoctoral Researcher with Yale’s Digital Ethics Center, specializes in comparative politics with a focus on authoritarian politics, information control, data transparency, and the digital economy.

Click on their profiles linked above to learn more about their exciting work.

And don’t forget to take a moment to learn about CSEAS faculty, students and staff, the life of our program!

We all look forward to seeing you at the next event and extend our warmest wishes for the 2026-2027 Academic Year.

With best wishes,

Erik Harms
Chair, Council on Southeast Asia Studies
Professor of Anthropology