Organizer: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawaii, Mānoa
Type/Location: Hybrid / Mānoa, HI
Description:
Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa for a talk by Barbara W. Andaya and Leonard Y. Andaya, Professors of Asian Studies at the University, which will identify and discuss the major changes that have occurred in Southeast Asian Studies over the last five decades.
The aim of this joint presentation is to identify the major changes that have occurred in Southeast Asian Studies over the last five decades. When we first embarked on our careers, the field of Southeast Asian history, particularly the early modern period (c.1400 – c. 1830s), was dominated by Western historians. At that time a principal concern was to fill gaps in our knowledge of “what happened,” both locally and regionally. Today the explosion of research topics, access to sources, interdisciplinary connections and the development of university departments dedicated to Southeast Asia within the region has opened the door to new agendas and widening participation, notably among Southeast Asians themselves. In the West there is a disturbing academic trend to question the value of history as a discipline and area studies more generally – a trend that has serious implications for the study of Southeast Asia, both past and present. Against this background, the future of Southeast Asian Studies, and specifically history, will be increasingly dependent on the contributions of Southeast Asian scholars, and they will establish research and teaching priorities for future generations.
Barbara Watson Andaya is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai’i and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. In 2005-06 she was President of the American Association of Asian Studies Educated at the University of Sydney (BA, Dip.Ed.), she received an East West Center grant in 1966 and obtained her MA in history at the University of Hawai’i. She subsequently went on to study for her Ph.D. at Cornell University with a specialization in Southeast Asian history.
Her career has involved teaching and researching in Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, the Netherlands, and since 1994, Hawai’i. She maintains an active teaching and research interest across all Southeast Asia, but her specific area of expertise is the western Malay-Indonesia archipelago. In 2000 she received a Guggenheim Award, which resulted in The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Southeast Asian History, 1500-1800 (a Choice Academic Book of the Year in 2007). Her current project is a history of Christian localization in Southeast Asia, 1511-1900, supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Leonard Y. Andaya is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in Honolulu. He has written extensively on the early modern history of Southeast Asia, particularly on Indonesia and Malaysia. His most recent publications are Leaves of the Same Tree: Trade and Ethnicity in the Straits of Melaka (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2008) and, with Barbara Watson Andaya, A History of Early Modern Southeast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015). He is currently writing a book on the history of eastern Indonesia in the early modern period using a sea perspective.
Registration:
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