Join NYSEAN, Weatherhead East Asian Institute, and the Columbia-Harvard China and the World program for a conference featuring Walden Bello, Pongphisoot Busbarat, Thomas Christensen, Sophal Ear, Joseph Chinyong Liow, Derek Mitchell, Ann Marie Murphy, Hong Hai Nguyen, Lien-Hang Nguyen, Elina Noor, Praslhant Parameswaran, Gregory Poling, Yohanes Sulaiman, and Ayumi Teraoka. These leading experts will examine the implications of a second Trump administration for US-Southeast Asian relations at this critical junction in global politics.

Join the Malaysia Studies Programme at ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute for a webinar on Patakan Harapan (the Alliance of Hope), featuring Wong Shu Qi, DAP Member of Parliament for Kluang, Johor; and Sim Tze Tzin, PKR Member of Parliament for Bayan Baru, Penang. They will discuss ongoing efforts within Patakan Harapan’s leading parties, drawing on their extensive experience in state legislatures and federal parliament, and various positions they have held in cabinet, parliamentary committees, and government agencies.

Join the Malaysia Studies Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute for a talk by Khairy Jamaluddin, Associate Senior Fellow and former Minister at Malaysia’s ministries of Youth and Sports, Science and Technology, and Health. Drawing insights from his podcast Keluar Sekejap, this seminar evaluates the Anwar Ibrahim administration's first two years in power, focusing on its policies, internal coalition dynamics, external threats, and future challenges.

Join NYSEAN for a book talk by Merlyna Lim, Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society, Professor of Communication and Media Studies, and Director of the ALiGN Media Lab at Carleton University. Social Media and Politics in Southeast Asia (Cambridge University Press, 2025) highlights the dual role of social media in both fostering grassroots activism and enabling autocratic practices of algorithmic politics, notably in electoral politics.

Join the Regional and Cultural Studies Programme at ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute for a seminar featuring Andar Nubowo, Muhammad Faiz bin Fadzil, and Mohamed Imran Mohamed Taib. The panel will be about Islam and the construction of modern national identity in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore.

Join the Malaysia Studies Programme at ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute for a public lecture by Abang Johari Tun Openg, the Premier of Sarawak, who will discuss Sarawak’s innovations in balancing rapid economic growth with environmental responsibility.

Join the Sigur Center for Asian Studies at the George Washington University for a conference on the Chinese Diaspora in Southeast Asia. This event brings together papers from scholars of maritime Southeast Asia who document and analyze the diverse but often precarious practices of everyday management of linguistic and cultural identities of diasporic Chinese in the Southeast Asian region.

Join the Malaysia Studies Programme at ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute for a talk by Tricia Yeoh, Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Nottingham Malaysia’s School of Politics and International Relations. Using the states of Selangor and Malacca as cases, this webinar examines UMNO’s current state of leadership and party institutionalization, and how it manages coalition dynamics with the Pakatan Harapan coalition at the grassroots level.

Join NYSEAN and the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University for a panel discussion with David M. Lampton, Kuik Cheng-Chwee, and Da Wei. This event will serve as the launch of a report commissioned by The Asia Foundation, with support from The Carnegie Corporation of New York, assessing the prospects for US-China-Southeast Asian relations based upon a conference held in Bangkok in May 2024. Ann Marie Murphy, NYSEAN co-founder, will moderate the discussion.

Join NYSEAN for a discussion of recent elections and political change in Southeast Asia with Sheila Coronel, Amy Freedman, John Gershman, Allen Hicken, Sidney Jones, J.M. Lanuza, Kanokrat Lertchoosakul, Ann Marie Murphy, Nava Nuraniyah, Jonathan Corpus Ong, Margaret Scott, and Meredith Weiss.

Hosted by ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute, Khairy Jamaluddin, a Visiting Senior Fellow at ISEAS, will dive into whether Anwar Ibrahim can win over Malay voters, especially in the upcoming six state elections scheduled in two months.

Hosted by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University, Sandy F. Chang, University of Florida, will discuss the formation of intimacies between Chinese women and Indian or Malay men as politically charged sites of racial knowledge production at the turn of the twentieth century in British Malaya.

Hosted by the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University, Asmus Rungby, Yale University, will outline his ongoing work to account for unarticulated insights and political attitudes among Urban Borneans.

Hosted by SEACoast, Dr. Benny Baskara, visiting Research Associate at UCSC Anthropology, will lead a discussion on Teren Sevea's book, Miracles and Material Life: Rice, Ore, Traps and Guns in Islamic Malaya.

Splendors of Malay World Textiles is an unprecedented exhibition put together by collector John Ang, displaying 650 textiles. This event is sponsored by University of Hawaii and the International Hajji Baba Society of Washington, DC.

Join the UCSC Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions for a discussion on Pontianak, a female vampire/ghost/monster in Malay cultures, and her kins in Southeast Asia. By using select chapters from Rosalind Galt's new book, Alluring Monsters: the Pontianak and Cinemas of Decolonization, this talk will consider gender relations, aesthetics, ethnic boundaries, urbanization, environmental change, and secularism in Southeast Asia.

In the past ten years, Malaysian society has increasingly witnessed the phenomenon of xin yimin, where citizens of the PRC have become long-term residents in Malaysia. Join Dr. Ngeow Chow-Bing, Institute of China Studies at the University of Malaya, and moderator Professor Leo Suryadinata, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, for a discussion on the social, political, cultural, and economic implications of this phenomenon.

Hosted by ISEAS - Yusof Ishak Institute, Datuk Seri Dr Dzulkefly Ahmad, a Member of Parliament for Kuala Selangor, will discuss Malaysia’s recent political, economic and social upheavals including the successes and failures of Malaysia’s Covid-19 response under the Muhyiddin and Ismail Sabri administrations.

In this talk organized by the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, Khoo Boo Teik, Professor Emeritus at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies in Tokyo, will discuss the impact of BERSIH, the Coalition for Clean and Fair Elections, on election reform and democratic politics in Malaysia.

In this seminar hosted by the East-West Center, Dan Slater, the Weiser Center for Emerging Democracies Director at University of Michigan, and Lynette Ong, an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto, will discuss Ong’s latest book The Street and the Ballot Box: Interactions between Social Movements and Electoral Politics in Authoritarian Contexts. NYSEAN member Satu P. Limaye will moderate this talk.

The Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series is a weekly lecture series featuring advanced Cornell Southeast Asia Program graduate students as well as academics, diplomats, researchers, and others who have expertise in Southeast Asia. Hanisah Abdullah Sani presents a talk on religion, law, and state-building in colonial Malaya.

The Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE), in partnership with Transparency International Malaysia and the Merdeka Center for Opinion Research, will be hosting a webinar on the transparency and impact of Malaysia’s COVID-19 stimulus relief funds.

Using survey experiments in Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Malaysia, which vary along regime types, and the salience of ethnic division, Mai Truong, PhD. Candidate in Political Science at University of Arizona, show that regime types, ethnic division, and the nature of policy-based movements interact to influence public support toward cross-movement coalitions under authoritarian rule.

This webinar will address the disappointment among DAP supporters that it had not made good on its election promises and failed to implement institutional reforms. Other questions addressed include: How will the DAP determine which parties it should work with both before and after the general election? What are the new challenges for the new generation of DAP leaders and how do their views and responses differ from the earlier generation? What are the key priorities of Malaysians post-Covid, and what therefore are DAP’s key policy objectives?

This webinar will trace the changing structural and domestic conditions underpinning ambiguities in Malaysia-United States relations, before presenting a preliminary assessment on the prospects and problems of the Malaysia-United States alignment in the post-pandemic era.

Dr. Sook Ning Chua, founder of Relate Malaysia, a nonprofit mental health organization, will discuss recent research findings, the challenges Relate Malaysia faces, and new directions for community mental health in Malaysia.

This event will address the question of how the January 6th event has been understood within 5 different Southeast Asian countries with variable levels of democracy: Myanmar, Cambodia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.

Gerald Sim discusses his new book, Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound, and Stability, with documentary filmmaker Tan Pin Pin. It is an interdisciplinary journey through a refreshing set of unique aesthetics from Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.

On May 9, 2018, the Barisan Nasional (BN) government lost Malaysia’s 14th general election (GE14) and was replaced by the Pakatan Harapan (PH) coalition. The election also saw significant changes at the state level, with PH now controlling seven states compared to its previous two, and BN controlling two compared to its previous eight. Aside from Kelantan, PAS regained Terengganu. The Sabah state government, held by Parti Warisan Sabah (Warisan) was aligned with PH, while the Sarawak state government was aligned with BN. This webinar featuring Tricia Yeoh (CEO of the Institute for Democracy and Economic Affairs (IDEAS), Visiting Fellow at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute, and PhD Candidate at the University of Nottingham Malaysia) will discuss federal-state relations during the Pakatan Harapan government’s administration from 2018 to 2020.

(Image: Vnonymous/Wikimedia Commons)

Malaysian youth have reached an advanced stage of manga consumption and begun creating original works. In this webinar, Dr. Rachel Chan Suet Kay (Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnic Studies, National University of Malaysia) will observe the emergence of a new wave of Malaysian-made manga that roots itself in locally recognizable depictions of standard ethnicity, gender, and social class dimensions, focusing her analysis on the specific manga publication “Kepahitan Tersembunyi” by Leoz, published under Gempak Starz. She argues that this particular manga novel reaches into a recognizable Malaysian landscape and highlights the way stylistic elements of manga are used to signify identifications of ethnicity, gender, and social class in a way that is recognizable to the Malaysian reader. This suggests that manga may be seen as a platform for the dramaturgy of “everyday-defined” realities (Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, 1996).