Ashley Thompson, the Hiram W. Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London, uses Buddha’s life story—his return from heaven and the socio-political order organized around the dissemination of his image afterwards—to contemplate how ideas of absence, return, and transformation shape identity and cultural restitution in Southeast Asia today.

This event was hosted by the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University, a NYSEAN Partner.

In this episode of Gatty Lecture Rewind, the host Namfon Narumol Choochan interviews Dr. Aditya Bhattacharjee, Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Asian Studies at Cornell University. Together, they discuss how growing up in Bangkok led him to study the localization and globalization of Hinduism. Focusing on the transnational appearances of Ganesha in Thailand and Thai restaurants in the United States, Dr. Bhattacharjee explains how and why this deity becomes a visible conduit for understanding the globalization of religious practices and religious belonging beyond the exclusively Thai-Buddhist framework.

In this episode of the New Books in Critical Theory, Vincent Pak discusses his new book, Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), which explores Christian discourses of sex and sexuality in Singapore to argue that metanoia, the theological concept of spiritual transformation, can be read as a form of neo-homophobia that coaxes change in the queer individual.