Organizer: NYSEAN; Program in International Relations at NYU
Type/Location: Hybrid / New York, NY
Description:
Join NYSEAN and NYU MAIR for a talk by Jeffrey Wasserstrom and Benjamin Tausig about the way that music features in their new books and how they engage with songs in their various writings. To begin the conversation, Benjamin will give a brief introduction to his latest book, Bangkok After Dark, which places nightlife in Thailand’s capital city during the Cold War into a transnational perspective via discussion of a jazz pianist. Jeffrey will then discuss his new book, The Milk Tea Alliance, the longest chapter in which is about protests in Bangkok for which the soundtrack included everything from hip hop numbers by the local hip hop collective Rap Against Dictatorship to the rousing imported anthem “Do You Hear the People Sing?”
Margaret Scott, NYSEAN co-founder, will moderate the discussion.
About the Speakers:
Jeffrey Wasserstrom is a Distinguished Professor of History at UC Irvine, who has focused on China for most of his career but has lately moved into the study of other parts of Asia and pan-Asian topics. His most recent book, which deals with Burma and Hong Kong as well as Thailand, is The Milk Tea Alliance: Inside Asia's Struggle Against Autocracy and Beijing (Columbia Global Reports, 2025). He is currently working on a book about Orwell and Asia.
Benjamin Tausig is Associate Professor of Critical Music Studies at SUNY-Stony Brook University. His first monograph, Bangkok Is Ringing: Sound, Protest, and Constraint (Oxford University Press, 2019), is an ethnography of the sound environment of the Thai protest movement of 2010-11. His new book, Bangkok After Dark: Maurice Rocco, Transnational Nightlife, and the Making of Cold War Intimacies (Duke, 2025), focuses on Thai-American nightlife relationships.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.
To attend the event online, please register here.