Highlights for the 2025-2026 Academic Year

The Council on Southeast Asia Studies is lucky to have an engaging group of faculty, students, staff, and visiting scholars that make Yale a truly exciting place to study and teach about Southeast Asia. This year, we are especially delighted to welcome two wonderful new faculty members: Dr. Piphal Heng and Dr. Louward Allen Zubiri!

Dr. Piphal Heng has been appointed as an Assistant Professor of Anthropology (Archaeology), Dr. Heng joins us from the University of California, Los Angeles, where he served as a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. His research focuses on historical archaeology, landscape, and settlement patterns in premodern and early modern Southeast Asia, particularly in Cambodia. Dr. Heng holds a Ph.D. and an M.A. from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, along with extensive fieldwork and publications in the archaeology of flow and urban transformation.

Dr. Louward Allen Zubiri has been appointed as Lector in Filipino (Tagalog) with the Southeast Asia Studies Council and MacMillan Center. Dr. Zubiri earned his Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He has a rich background in teaching and research, with experience at institutions in the Philippines and North America, including the University of Hawaii and the University of Victoria in BC, Canada. Dr. Zubiri is recognized for his commitment to student-centered and community-based research, as well as his expertise in heritage language acquisition and multilingual multicultural education aimed at achieving meaningful learning outcomes. He will be leading the creation of Yale’s new program in Filipino/Tagalog language and Philippine Studies.

We are thrilled to have these two distinguished and extremely energetic teacher-scholars join our community and look forward to all the contributions they will bring to the study of Southeast Asia.

For the 2025-2026 academic year, CSEAS is hosting two Fulbright-sponsored Foreign Language Teaching Assistants (FLTAs): Sabillatullatifah will be assisting with Indonesian Language courses; and Đồng Ngọc Minh Thư will be assisting with Vietnamese. In addition, Dr. Phi Nguyen, will be completing a book on the city of Huế during the second of the two years she has been spending at Yale as a postdoctoral fellow, sponsored by a prestigious award from the Swiss National Science Foundation. We are also planning to host several fellows beginning in January and will update this page when those positions are finalized.

CSEAS also celebrates the career of professor Carol Carpenter, who retired at the end of the last academic year after having taught at Yale since Fall 1998. Carol’s research and teaching have been central to building Yale’s teaching and research about the social dimensions of conservation and sustainable development in Southeast Asia, and we are grateful to her many years of active involvement in our Council.

CSEAS is excited to be hosting a full slate of brownbag lectures, which are scheduled in the traditional noontime slot on Wednesdays and continue to be held in Luce Hall room 203. We will kick of the semester with a catered Meet and Greet, to be held at noon on September 3^rd, and the first formal talk of the series will be given on September 10th by our colleague, the historian Nurfadzilah Yahaya, who will speak on "British Hydrocolonialism in Southeast Asia." Upcoming lectures for the rest of the semester can be found on the CSEAS events calendar.

In addition to our regular programming, we are especially pleased to highlight a semester-long exhibition hosted by the Yale University Art Gallery: Nusantara: Six Centuries of Indonesian Textiles. Described as “a sweeping exhibition that celebrates the elaborate textile heritage of Indonesia and explores the ancient interisland links found in this vast maritime region,” the exhibition will officially open on September 12, 2025 and remain open through January 11, 2026. The exhibition is organized by Ruth Barnes, the Thomas Jaffe Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, with the assistance of Arielle Winnik, the Donna Torrance Assistant Curator of Indo-Pacific Art, and is made possible by Hunter Thompson, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, and the Robert Lehman, B.A. 1913, Endowment Fund.

In conjunction with the Nusantara exhibition, Ruth Barnes and the Art Gallery are also hosting an opening lecture by Barbara Watson Andaya Living Cloth: Textiles and Society in Indonesia, (September 25, 2025, 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm), followed by a reception with a gamelan performance. On September 26, Ruth Barnes and Arielle Winnik will host a workshop with seven invited speakers. Ruth will also give a gallery tour Indonesian Textiles: Numbers, Colors, and the Thread of Life (October 1, 2025, 12:30 pm – 1:30 pm).

We have an exciting semester ahead of us and look forward to all of the Southeast Asia related programming!