Organizer: Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, Cornell University

Type/Location: In person / Ithaca, NY

Description:

What is the global context of doing Thai intellectual history today? First, it is always a cross-cultural encounter, always involving comparison, interpretation and translation across literal and cultural languages. Second, despite being non-colonized, Siam’s transformation to modernity went through the encounters of different intellectual worlds of unequal powers. Thirdly, it unavoidably involves the encounters between different academies whose particular environments (politics, economy, scholarly culture, etc.) often lead to different questions, points of view, even methodology. Finally, a scholar in this field approaches the subject with different positioning, from one of the “Other” to one of the “Self” as a home scholar, and anything in between, hence the different politics of knowledge.

Thongchai Winichakul, Emeritus Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Apart from eight books in Thai, his wrote two prize-winning books, Siam Mapped (1994, Harry Benda Prize, AAS, 1995) and Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok (2020, EUROSEAS 2022 award and George Kahin Prize, AAS, 2023). He received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship (1994), and was awarded the Fukuoka Grand Prize (2023). He was President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2013/14. His research interests are in the intellectual foundations of modern Siam under colonial conditions.  

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