Gatty Rewind Podcast

In the penultimate podcast from the first season of the Gatty Rewind, Michael, Astara Light, and Ryan Buyco sit down with Mariam Lam from the University of California Riverside, to talk about the challenges and opportunities for graduate students studying in Southeast Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. The interview moves from advice to graduate students submitting articles to descriptions of barriers keeping different area studies programs apart. We hope you enjoy the podcast with Mariam! 

Episode 10 of the podcast features Cornell graduate students Michael and Emily Donald interview Katie Rainwater, PhD Candidate at Cornell University, to discuss her research into shrimp farming in Thailand, part of her larger dissertation project that compares shrimp exports as a development strategy in Bangladesh and Thailand. In her project, Katie uses the plight of small-scale shrimp farmers as a lens to consider the relationship of rural Thai people with Thai agribusiness and the Thai state. Let's talk about crustaceans.

In this week's episode, Michael and Cornell PhD Candidate Van Mai Tran sit down with Erin Lin, Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University, to chat about her research into the legacy of US bombing from the Vietnam War on the land and agriculture in Cambodia, and the ways that different groups within Cambodia deal with the effects of undetonated bombs on fertile rice paddies in their country. Using a dataset of declassified US Air Force records and an agricultural survey of over 3,600 rice paddies across Cambodia, I show that in highly fertile soil, this mechanical failure still poses risk from the unexploded ordnance, and farmers are deterred from efficiently using their land.

In this week's episode of the Gatty Rewind, Michael and Juan Fernandez sit down with Arnout van der Meer from Colby College, to discuss his Gatty Lecture, "Performing Colonialism: Hegemony, Representative Culture, and Resistance in Late Colonial Indonesia." In this episode, Arnout discusses his journey to studying colonial Indonesia at Rutgers, the archival research involved in his current book manuscript, and how he plans to look at Southeast Asian colonial fairs in the future. Also discussed: how to get a job after graduate school, getting different historical perspectives from colonial sources, and interrogating Indonesian literature. To Java! 

In episode 7 of the podcast, Michael and Astara Light interview Faizah Zakaria, who presented a Gatty talk titled, "The Toba Super Catastrophe as the History of a Future." In her lecture, Faizah examines the origins and development of the super catastrophe theory, offering both a synthesis of Toba's prehistory as pieced together through science as well as a meta-narrative of how knowledge about this event was shaped by contemporary concerns about the future of humanity. To Sumatra!  

In this week’s episode of the podcast, Michael and Ryan Buyco interview Nico Ravanilla from UC San Diego about his Gatty lecture, “Political Cycle in Public Works Procurement in the Philippines.” Using granular data on public works procurement in the Philippines from 2004-2017, Nico provides evidence of electorally driven corruption and inefficiency in the procurement of public works. Nico finds that patterns in procurement explain the persistent poor quality, and repeated allocation of funds for repairs of public works, especially in highly competitive districts.

In the 5th episode of the pod, Michael and Hoang Minh Vu chat with Xiaoming Zhang about his Gatty lecture, “China’s 1979 War with Vietnam,” in which Professor Zhang discussed Vietnam’s 1979 war with Vietnam, and asked the questions: What are lessons from the 1979 war? How is the war remembered, or forgotten, by ordinary Chinese? Answers may depend on more archival materials, but for the time being, it’s obvious that the war left wounds that are deeply embedded in the people’s psyche of both countries.

In the 4th episode of the Gatty Lecture Rewind Podcast, Michael and Sireemas Maspong sit down with Daniel Kaufman to discuss his Gatty Lecture, “Between Mainland and Island Southeast Asia.” In his lecture, Daniel shows how research in linguistics so far has focused on the eastern contact zones between Austronesians and non-Austronesian (Melanesian/Papuan) populations. With the exception of the Acehnese and Chamic languages, much less attention has been given to western Indonesia in this regard. To Borneo.

In this week’s podcast, Michael chats with Yen Vu, PhD Candidate in the Romance Studies Department at Cornell University about her research into Vietnamese Francophone Literature. Yen’s Gatty Lecture, “Prodigal sons and disparate selves: Vietnamese youth and intellectuals in colonial transitions,” analyzes “the return of the prodigal son,” of Vietnamese youth, particularly the phenomena of Vietnamese students studying abroad in the France during the 1920s and 1930s. While some Vietnamese would stay for marriage or work, most would eventually return to Vietnam. Yen argues that “contrary to the proverbial parable, the narrators in the imagined returns of these francophone texts are never quite met with forgiveness and resolution.”

In the second episode of the Gatty Lecture Rewind Podcast, Michael Miller and Juan Fernandez chat with Etin Anwar about her research, publications, and teaching at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Etin’s talk, “Epistemology of Islamic Feminism,” discussed how Islamic feminism emerged, developed, and proliferated in Indonesia. Etin highlighted the patterns and the changes of the encounters between Islam and feminism from 1900 to the early 1990s and the effects on the definition of Islamic feminism in Indonesia.