New Books in Southeast Asian Studies

By New Books Network

Society & Culture History

What's New Books in Southeast Asian Studies about?

Interviews with Scholars of Southeast Asia about their New Books

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New Books in Southeast Asian Studies episodes:

04.16.2024
Elliott Prasse-Freeman, "Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar" (Stanford UP, 2023)
Over three years have passed since a military coup of February 2021 in Myanmar precipitated a popular uprising that has since transformed into a revolutionary situation. While researchers and writers have cobbled together edited books trying to come to terms...
04.05.2024
Jane M. Ferguson, "Silver Screens and Golden Dreams: A Social History of Burmese Cinema" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)
Within the social sciences and the humanities, international research in Burma/Myanmar studies tends to lean toward political science and Buddhist studies, or what can be characterized as the “soldiers or monks” approach. The political situation within the country has restricted...
03.24.2024
Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)
Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations (Cornell University Press, 2024) illuminates the crucial place of religion in nineteenth-century American diplomacy. From the 1810s through the 1920s, Protestant missionaries positioned themselves as key experts in the development of American relations...
03.19.2024
Financial Access and Socio-Economic Development in Indonesia
Globally, 1.4 billion people are considered to be “financially excluded,” meaning they cannot safely access appropriate and affordable financial services. Muslim communities have particularly high levels of financial exclusion – for example, Muslim-majority countries have 24% lower participation rates in...
03.15.2024
Amber Worlds: The Global Amber Trade in the China-Myanmar Borderlands
What role do China and other Asian countries play in the global amber trade? And, what can we learn about the big challenges of our time by studying amber? In this episode, Kenneth Bo Nielsen talks to Alessandro Rippa about...
03.15.2024
Charlotte Setijadi, "Memories of Unbelonging: Ethnic Chinese Identity Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
The ethnic Chinese have had a long and problematic history in Indonesia, commonly stereotyped as a market-dominant minority with dubious political loyalty toward Indonesia. For over three decades under Suharto’s New Order regime, a cultural assimilation policy banned Chinese languages,...
03.12.2024
David E. Gilbert, "Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography" (U California Press, 2024)
Two decades ago, a group of Indonesian agricultural workers began occupying the agribusiness plantation near their homes. In the years since, members of this remarkable movement have reclaimed collective control of their land and cultivated diverse agricultural forests on it,...
03.05.2024
Diego Javier Luis, "The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History" (Harvard UP, 2024)
Between 1565 and 1815, the so-called Manila galleons enjoyed a near-complete monopoly on transpacific trade between Spain’s Asian and American colonies. Sailing from the Philippines to Mexico and back, these Spanish trading ships also facilitated the earliest migrations and displacements...
03.01.2024
Ryan Wolfson-Ford, "Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos" (U Wisconsin Press, 2024)
Ryan Wolfson-Ford’s provocative new book, Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos (U Wisconsin Press, 2024), is an intellectual history of Laos during the Cold War. The book challenges the established view that Cold War Laos was a plaything...
02.29.2024
Steve Ferzacca, "Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore" (NUS Press, 2021)
The basement of a veteran shopping mall located in the central business district of Singapore affords opportunities to a group of amateur and semi-professional musicians, of different ethnicities, ages, and generations to make a sonic way of life. Based on...
02.28.2024
Airports, Buses, Internet Cables, and the Local and National Politics in the Philippines
What can airports, busses, and submarine internet cables tell us about the local and national politics in the Philippines? And how do they position the country within the broader regional and global geopolitical struggles over economic development and political influence?...
02.26.2024
Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" (Duke UP, 2021)
Through a creative focus on skin, in Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam (Duke UP, 2021), Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu examines the ongoing influence of the Vietnam War on contemporary ideas about race and beauty. Framing skin...
02.10.2024
Cheow Thia Chan, "Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature" (Columbia UP, 2022)
Malaysian Chinese (Mahua) literature is marginalized on several fronts. In the international literary space, which privileges the West, Malaysia is considered remote. The institutions of modern Chinese literature favor mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Within Malaysia, only texts in...
02.02.2024
Use of Bacteriophages as Natural Antimicrobials to Manage Bacterial Pathogens in Aquaculture in Vietnam and Australia
Aquaculture is the fastest-growing protein production industry globally, with Vietnam one of the top producers and exporters of seafood products. In Vietnam, aquaculture is seen as a means of protecting rural livelihoods threatened by the consequences of climate change on...
02.01.2024
Petra Alderman, "Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand" (Routledge, 2023)
What does nation-branding mean to you? For many listeners, the term probably conjures up ideas of catchy slogans and international tourism or trade promotion campaigns. Think again. In her new book Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled...
01.28.2024
Alka Vaid Menon, "Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards" (U California Press, 2023)
Cosmetic surgery was once associated with a one-size-fits-all approach, modifying patients to conform to a single standard of beauty. As this surgery has become more accessible worldwide, changing beauty trends have led to a proliferation of beauty standards for members...
01.25.2024
Genevieve Alva Clutario, "Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941" (Duke UP, 2023)
Beauty is often dismissed as superfluous and frivolous cultural consumption. In her book, Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941 (Duke UP, 2023), Genevieve Clutario asks the readers, "what can we gain by taking beauty seriously?"...
01.24.2024
Bliss Cua Lim, "The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema" (Duke UP, 2024)
In The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema (Duke University Press, 2024), Bliss Cua Lim draws on cultural policy, queer and feminist theory, materialist media studies, and postcolonial historiography to analyze the crisis-ridden history of Philippine film archiving—a history of lost films, limited...
01.23.2024
Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, "Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats" (Penn State UP, 2023)
A uniquely powerful marker of ethnic, gender, and class identities, scent can also overwhelm previously constructed boundaries and transform social-sensory realities within contexts of environmental degradation, pathogen outbreaks, and racial politics. Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland's edited volume Aromas of Asia: Exchanges,...
01.16.2024
Thomas Baudinette, "Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture" (Bloomsbury, 2023)
Thomas Baudinette's Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture (Bloomsbury, 2023) explores the contours of fandom, and in particular the mainstreaming of queer romance, not only in Thailand but in the Philippines and also Japan. Topics...
12.26.2023
Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)
Jeremy Yellen’s The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War (Cornell University Press, 2019) is a challenging transnational exploration of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan’s ambitious, confused, and much maligned attempt to create a...
12.22.2023
Reading the Stars: When Divination Meets Politics in Thailand
What does astrology, palm-reading and fortune telling have to do with politics in Thailand, and how can we make sense of these divination practices and their use in Thai politics? Listen to Edoardo Siani and Petra Alderman in this episode...
12.20.2023
Vineeta Sinha. "Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia" (Berghahn Books, 2023)
The notions of labour, mobility and piety have a complex and intertwined relationship. Using ethnographic methods and a historical perspective, Vineeta Sinha's Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia (Berghahn Books, 2023) critically outlines the interlink of railway construction in...
12.15.2023
Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)
In 1863 the French established a protectorate over the kingdom of Cambodia. The protectorate, along with Vietnam and Laos, later became part of the colonial state of French Indochina. Part of the French ‘civilizing mission’ in Cambodia involved reforming Cambodian...
12.15.2023
Kawi Culture: Exploring Indonesia’s Classical Civilisation
Have you ever heard of Kawi? Much of what is considered “classical” in Indonesian history, such as the Borobudur temple complex or the kingdom of Majapahit, is a product of Kawi Culture. In fact, Indonesian society emerged from the ancient...
12.11.2023
Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)
The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies (Cornell University Press, 2023) by Dr. Yan Slobodkin traces the history of famine in the modern French Empire, showing that hunger is intensely local and sweepingly global, shaped by regional contexts...
12.04.2023
Nur Sobers-Khan et al., "Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia" (2023)
Scholarly discussions on Islam in print have focused predominantly on the role of Urdu in the development of North Indian Muslim publics (Dubrow, 2018; Robb, 2020), ʿulama and Islamic jurisprudence (Tareen, 2020) and relations between Islam and colonial modernity (Robinson,...
12.01.2023
SSEAC Cambodia Field School: Anti-Microbial Resistance in Cambodia
In the last of our five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Cambodia, which looked anti-microbial resistance (AMR). This field school...
12.01.2023
Sinae Hyun, "Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)
Historians have tended to view the Cold War as a global ideological confrontation between an expansionist communist Soviet Union and a capitalist United States which sought to contain communism. And this confrontation was fought out by their proxies in the...
11.23.2023
SSEAC Timor Leste Field School: Disability and Work
In the fourth of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Timor Leste, which looked at disability and work. This field...
11.17.2023
Konstantinos Retsikas, "A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)
In A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), Konstantinos Retsikas has anthropological investigation into the different forms the economy assumes, and the different purposes it serves, when conceived from the perspective...
11.16.2023
Arupjyoti Saikia, "The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000" (India Allen Lane, 2023)
The northeast Indian state of Assam has had a complex history. As independence loomed, Assam was a large British province, bordering the fellow British colony of Burma and covering a large segment of India’s northeast. Today’s Assam is much smaller:...
11.15.2023
Eve Warburton, "Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State" (Cornell UP, 2023)
In Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State (Cornell UP, 2023), Eve Warburton traces nationalist policy trajectories in Indonesia back to the preferences of big local business interests. Commodity booms often prompt more nationalist policy styles in resource-rich countries....
11.15.2023
Briana L. Wong, "Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023)
The Cambodian Civil War and genocide of the late 1960s and ’70s left the country and its diaspora with long-lasting trauma that continues to reverberate through the community. In Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023), Briana L....
11.14.2023
SSEAC Philippines Field School: Disaster Risk and Resilience
In the third of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to the Philippines, which looked at disaster risk and resilience. This...
11.08.2023
SSEAC Indonesia Field School: Social Justice
In the second of five special podcasts about from the recent SSEAC field schools to Southeast Asia, we will be hearing from students and staff from the field school to Indonesia, which looked at social justice. This field school was...
11.01.2023
Gerard McCarthy, "Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality, and Resistance in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2023)
In late 2015 Daw Aung San Suu Kyi led Myanmar’s National League for Democracy to a smashing general election victory. In one of her first public appearances since the win, Suu Kyi went to a roadside to be photographed by...
10.19.2023
Chris Stowers, "Bugis Nights" (Earnshaw Books, 2023)
In 1987, Chris Stowers ditches his dull job in the UK and embarks on a trip throughout the Asia-Pacific, following countless other adventurers traveling with just a backpack and a miniscule budget in what he calls the “golden age of...
10.15.2023
Hyun Bang Shin et al., "COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World" (Ubiquity Press, 2021)
COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World (Ubiquity Press, 2021) brings together an ensemble of social scientists who offer critical reflections on how the pandemic was experienced in the region. It interrogates dominants narratives of Covid-19’s legacies and invites readers...
10.13.2023
Working Children: The Luxury and Complexity of Childhood in Lombok, Indonesia
The International Labour Organization estimates that in Southeast Asia there are 30 million children engaged in paid work, 17 million in engaged in unpaid work and 50 million who don’t attend school. These figures can be a shock to people...
10.05.2023
Alexandra Kaloyanides, "Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom" (Columbia UP, 2023)
Adoniram Judson was the 19th-century version of an American celebrity. Americans flocked to listen to his tales of being one of the first missionaries to enter the Kingdom of Burma. Americans wanted to hear of his mission in the Buddhist...
10.01.2023
Lynette J. Chua, "The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)
The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia (Cambridge UP, 2022) offers an empirically-grounded approach to understanding the mobilisation of rights in the region. Instead of deriving definitions of rights from abstract philosophical text, court verdicts or statutes, the book advances a...
09.21.2023
Kathrin Eitel, "Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh" (Routledge, 2022)
Kathrin Eitel's book Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh (Routledge, 2022) examines the recycling infrastructure in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It considers the circular flows of waste and practices through 'infracycles', maintenance practices that tinker with the...
09.19.2023
Piers Kelly, "The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines" (Oxford UP, 2021)
In the southern Philippines, the Bohol community speaks a language they say one man, Pinay, created long ago, leaving it for a modern Filipino named Mariano Datahan to rediscover and reenliven. The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines (Oxford...
09.16.2023
Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)
The East India Company is remembered as the world's most powerful, not to say notorious, corporation. But for many of its advocates from the 1770s to the 1850s it was also the world's most enlightened one. Joshua Ehrlich reveals that a...
09.15.2023
Development and Migration in Contemporary Asia
Is migration good or bad for development? How does migration affect those who leave and those who stay behind? How are rural and urban livelihoods interconnected in Asian cities? What are the likely main migration trends in Asia the coming...
09.14.2023
Gregory Cahill, "The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen" (Life Drawn, 2023)
The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen (Life Drawn, 2023) is very well-reseraech graphic novel based on the life of beloved Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, whose “Golden Voice” helped define Cambodia’s Golden Age of music until her...
09.12.2023
A Better Way to Buy Books
Bookshop.org is an online book retailer that donates more than 80% of its profits to independent bookstores. Launched in 2020, Bookshop.org has already raised more than $27,000,000. In this interview, Andy Hunter, founder and CEO discusses his journey to creating one of the...
09.11.2023
Inequality as a Leading Cross-Cutting Development Issue: Indonesia and Beyond
Inequality has always been key to understanding Indonesia’s development. But this is a multidimensional issue, and one that has manifested in vastly different ways in Indonesia over the years: from low and stable inequality, to the aspiration to inequality, to...
09.03.2023
Allan Punzalan Isaac, "Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor" (Fordham UP, 2021)
From spectacular deaths in a drag musical to competing futures in a call center, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor (Fordham UP, 2021) examines how contracted service labor performed by Filipinos in the Philippines, Europe, the Middle East, and the United...

What's New Books in Southeast Asian Studies about?

Download our free app to listen on your phone

New Books in Southeast Asian Studies episodes:

Elliott Prasse-Freeman, "Rights Refused: Grassroots Activism and State Violence in Myanmar" (Stanford UP, 2023)

Jane M. Ferguson, "Silver Screens and Golden Dreams: A Social History of Burmese Cinema" (U Hawaii Press, 2024)

Emily Conroy-Krutz, "Missionary Diplomacy: Religion and Nineteenth-Century American Foreign Relations" (Cornell UP, 2024)

Financial Access and Socio-Economic Development in Indonesia

Amber Worlds: The Global Amber Trade in the China-Myanmar Borderlands

Charlotte Setijadi, "Memories of Unbelonging: Ethnic Chinese Identity Politics in Post-Suharto Indonesia" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)

David E. Gilbert, "Countering Dispossession, Reclaiming Land: A Social Movement Ethnography" (U California Press, 2024)

Diego Javier Luis, "The First Asians in the Americas: A Transpacific History" (Harvard UP, 2024)

Ryan Wolfson-Ford, "Forsaken Causes: Liberal Democracy and Anticommunism in Cold War Laos" (U Wisconsin Press, 2024)

Steve Ferzacca, "Sonic City: Making Rock Music and Urban Life in Singapore" (NUS Press, 2021)

Airports, Buses, Internet Cables, and the Local and National Politics in the Philippines

Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, "Experiments in Skin: Race and Beauty in the Shadows of Vietnam" (Duke UP, 2021)

Cheow Thia Chan, "Malaysian Crossings: Place and Language in the Worlding of Modern Chinese Literature" (Columbia UP, 2022)

Use of Bacteriophages as Natural Antimicrobials to Manage Bacterial Pathogens in Aquaculture in Vietnam and Australia

Petra Alderman, "Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand" (Routledge, 2023)

Alka Vaid Menon, "Refashioning Race: How Global Cosmetic Surgery Crafts New Beauty Standards" (U California Press, 2023)

Genevieve Alva Clutario, "Beauty Regimes: A History of Power and Modern Empire in the Philippines, 1898-1941" (Duke UP, 2023)

Bliss Cua Lim, "The Archival Afterlives of Philippine Cinema" (Duke UP, 2024)

Hannah Gould and Gwyn McClelland, "Aromas of Asia: Exchanges, Histories, Threats" (Penn State UP, 2023)

Thomas Baudinette, "Boys Love Media in Thailand: Celebrity, Fans, and Transnational Asian Queer Popular Culture" (Bloomsbury, 2023)

Jeremy Yellen, "The Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: When Total Empire Met Total War" (Cornell UP, 2019)

Reading the Stars: When Divination Meets Politics in Thailand

Vineeta Sinha. "Temple Tracks: Labour, Piety and Railway Construction in Asia" (Berghahn Books, 2023)

Sally Frances Low, "Colonial Law Making: Cambodia Under the French" (NUS Press, 2023)

Kawi Culture: Exploring Indonesia’s Classical Civilisation

Yan Slobodkin, "The Starving Empire: A History of Famine in France's Colonies" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Nur Sobers-Khan et al., "Beyond Colonial Rupture: Print Culture and the Emergence of Muslim Modernity in Nineteenth-Century South Asia" (2023)

SSEAC Cambodia Field School: Anti-Microbial Resistance in Cambodia

Sinae Hyun, "Indigenizing the Cold War: The Border Patrol Police and Nation-Building in Thailand" (U Hawaii Press, 2023)

SSEAC Timor Leste Field School: Disability and Work

Konstantinos Retsikas, "A Synthesis of Time: Zakat, Islamic Micro-finance and the Question of the Future in 21st-Century Indonesia" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020)

Arupjyoti Saikia, "The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000" (India Allen Lane, 2023)

Eve Warburton, "Resource Nationalism in Indonesia: Booms, Big Business, and the State" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Briana L. Wong, "Cambodian Evangelicalism: Cosmological Hope and Diasporic Resilience" (Pennsylvania State UP, 2023)

SSEAC Philippines Field School: Disaster Risk and Resilience

SSEAC Indonesia Field School: Social Justice

Gerard McCarthy, "Outsourcing the Polity: Non-State Welfare, Inequality, and Resistance in Myanmar" (Cornell UP, 2023)

Chris Stowers, "Bugis Nights" (Earnshaw Books, 2023)

Hyun Bang Shin et al., "COVID-19 in Southeast Asia: Insights for a Post-pandemic World" (Ubiquity Press, 2021)

Working Children: The Luxury and Complexity of Childhood in Lombok, Indonesia

Alexandra Kaloyanides, "Baptizing Burma: Religious Change in the Last Buddhist Kingdom" (Columbia UP, 2023)

Lynette J. Chua, "The Politics of Rights and Southeast Asia" (Cambridge UP, 2022)

Kathrin Eitel, "Recycling Infrastructures in Cambodia: Circularity, Waste, and Urban Life in Phnom Penh" (Routledge, 2022)

Piers Kelly, "The Last Language on Earth: Linguistic Utopianism in the Philippines" (Oxford UP, 2021)

Joshua Ehrlich, "The East India Company and the Politics of Knowledge" (Cambridge UP, 2023)

Development and Migration in Contemporary Asia

Gregory Cahill, "The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen" (Life Drawn, 2023)

A Better Way to Buy Books

Inequality as a Leading Cross-Cutting Development Issue: Indonesia and Beyond

Allan Punzalan Isaac, "Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor" (Fordham UP, 2021)