Join NYSEAN, Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU, Espacio de Culturas at NYU, and the NYU Department of History for a book talk by Dr. Adrian De Leon, Assistant Professor of History at NYU. Dr. De Leon will be in conversation with Dr. Karen Miller, Professor of History and American Studies at LaGuardia Community College and the CUNY Graduate Center, and Dr. Chris Cañete Rodriguez Kelly, Mellon Teaching Fellow and Lecturer of English at Columbia University.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Dr. Daphne Weber, Program Officer of Buddhist Studies at the American Council of Learned Societies. Dr. Weber will discuss generational influences on Thailand’s first Theravada Bhikkhuni (Buddhist nun).

Join the Southeast Asia Digital Library for an online discussion on colonial collections in and on the Philippines, featuring speakers from Yale University: Dr. Cheryl Beredo, Director of Collections and Chief Curator, and Dr. Aurélie Vialette, Associate Professor of Spanish and Portuguese.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan for a talk by Chris Hulshof, GETSEA Director of Community Engagement and History PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Hulshof will discuss how the British psychological warfare campaign in Indonesia not only flooded the Indonesian market with black propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts, but deftly manipulated the international news circuit to spread Indonesian Army propaganda across the globe.

Join the Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia (GETSEA) consortium for a community book read with Dr. Faizah Zakaria, Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore, author of The Camphor Tree and the Elephant: Religion and Ecological Change in Maritime Southeast Asia, and winner of the 2025 Benda Prize. Dr. Juno Salazar Parreñas, Associate Professor of Science and Technology Studies and Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University, will moderate the discussion.

Join NYSEAN for a book talk by Bradley R. Simpson, Professor of History and Asian Studies at the University of Connecticut and Founder/Director of the Indonesia and East Timor Documentation Project at the National Security Archive.

Join the Harvard University Asia Center for a talk by Michitake Aso, Associate Professor of History at the University at Albany, SUNY. Dr. Aso’s talk examines how Vietnamese scientists and medical doctors built the evidentiary case against Agent Orange and its contaminant TCDD dioxin during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Join the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies for a book talk by Richard Quang-Anh Tran, indepedent scholar. Queer Vietnam recovers the forgotten stories of variant genders and sexualities in early twentieth-century Vietnam.

Join the  Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Center at the London School of Economics and Political Science for a talk by Dr. Tharaphi Than, Associate Professor of World Languages and Cultures at Northern Illinois University. Dr. Than will discuss how rice became central to socialist meaning-making, resistance, and the politics of survival in Burma.

Join the Indonesian Film Forum for the East Coast premiere of Turang (1957) by Bachtiar Siagian. This seminal piece of Indonesian film history was screened at the 1958 Afro-Asian Film Festival in Tashkent, Uzbekistan. Until its rediscovery in a film archive in Moscow in 2023, Turang was considered lost due to the Suharto regime’s repression of leftist and neorealist art.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Michigan for a talk by Chantal Croteau, PhD Candidate in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Croteau will discuss the relations of kinship, precarity, and loss generated through the volatile world of the boom-and-bust tin mining industry in southern Thailand.

Join the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) for a talk by Dr. Borbála Száva, CKS Senior Research Fellow, who is conducting fieldwork in Cambodia on the iconography and costume typology of 11th-century Angkorian temples. Dr. Száva’s lecture presents the preliminary results of a four-month fieldwork project examining costume and attire in the figural depictions of the Baphuon temple (11th century, Angkor).

Join the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU for a talk by Geok Yian Goh, Associate Professor of History at Nanyang Technological University, who will discuss the archaeological record and everyday life of Singapore and Bagan, Myanmar, which are two urban centers that overlapped in time.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Chris Hulshof, GETSEA Director of Community Engagement and History PhD Candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Hulshof will discuss how the British psychological warfare campaign in Indonesia not only flooded the Indonesian market with black propaganda leaflets and radio broadcasts, but deftly manipulated the international news circuit to spread Indonesian Army propaganda across the globe.

Join the Indonesia Project at Australian National University for a talk by Arif Anindita, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Business and Law at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy. Dr. Anindita will discuss the impact of the 1965-66 anti-communist purge in Indonesia on Java's demographic transition.

Join the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University for a talk by Visiting Scholar, Dr. David Thang Moe. Drawing on firsthand experience, current research, and his forthcoming monograph Beyond Buddhist Nationalism (Oxford University Press), he will discuss ungovernability, centralized nationalism, decentralized resistance, ethnic reconciliation, and visions of democratic nationhood in Myanmar.

Join the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University for a talk by Andrew Mertha,  the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Director of the China Studies Program, and Director of the SAIS China Research Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. Dr. Mertha will discuss his new book on the Khmer Rouge, revolution, and leadership struggles.

Join NYSEAN and Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU for a talk by Gina Apostol, acclaimed author who teaches writing at the Fieldston School, Barnard College, and The New School; and Neferti Tadiar, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College.

Join the Asian American / Asian Research Institute at CUNY for a book talk on Contemporary Art and Ecological Transformation in East and Southeast Asia, an edited volume that examines how contemporary art in East and Southeast Asia confronts environmental destruction, ecological degradation, and social injustice against the backdrop of global ecological crises. Featured speakers include Meqin Wang, Professor of Art at California State University, Northridge; Midori Yamamura, Associate Professor of Art History at Kingsborough Community College/CUNY and an Alcaly/Bodian Distinguished Scholar at the CUNY Graduate Center; Stephanie Benzaquen-Gautier, research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden and the Center for Khmer Studies; and Vicki Kwon, Associate Curator of Korean Art and Culture at the Royal Ontario Museum.

Join the Institute of Fine Arts at NYU for a talk by Dr. Jessica Rahardjo, Research Associate at the Khalili Research Centre, University of Oxford. Dr. Rahardjo’s lecture will explore the adoption of Islam in Indonesia through the adoption of specific tombstone forms and their subsequent transformations in Aceh and the Minangkabau highlands in western Sumatra.

Join the LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asian Center for a talk by Rianne Subijanto, Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York. Her book, Communication against Capital: Red Enlightenment at the Dawn of Indonesia, tells a story of the processes through which ordinary people mobilized an anticolonial communist resistance against Dutch rule through the production of revolutionary communication in the 1920s.

Join the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University for a talk by Christina E. Firpo, Professor of Southeast Asian history at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo. Dr. Firpo will discuss her new book, Beauty and the Nation, which explores the changing perspectives on Vietnamese women's beauty and their role in society during the interwar years.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Department of Environmental Studies, and Department of Earth, Atmosphere, and Environment at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Matthew E. Andersen, Senior Scientist for Biology for the U.S. Geological Survey Office of International Programs. Having led the development of decision-support tools for the Lower Mekong River Basin in Southeast Asia, this talk will explore the history, geography, and socioeconomic science of the Mekong River Delta.

Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University for a talk by Patrick Daly, a Staff Scientist for Sustainability and Resilience in the Department of Anthropology at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Daly synthesizes nearly two decades of historical and geo-archaeological research in Aceh, Indonesia to build a detailed paleo-tsunami history, demonstrating that the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was the latest in a 7,000-year history of recurring, massive events in the region.

Join the Council on Southeast Asian Studies at Yale University for a talk by sociocultural anthropologist Eve M. Zucker, Yale University, NYSEAN Executive Member, and President of the Center for Khmer Studies. Building on previous research, her talk explores historical memory, territoriality, and post-conflict repair through the transformation of a Khmer Rouge monument into a shrine for a powerful guardian spirit known for defending Cambodia against historical Siamese invasions and protecting contemporary travelers.

Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University for a talk by Mark Sanchez, Assistant Professor of Asian and Asian American Studies at Vanderbilt University, who will discuss how legal advocates fought to defend civil liberties during the martial law era in the Philippines (1972-1981).

Join the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University for a talk by Christina H. Lee, Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese and Acting Chair of the Humanities Council at Princeton University. Professor Lee will discuss how elite indigenous women in the Philippines signed documents in pre-Hispanic indigenous scripts known as baybayin, demonstrating their persistence in preserving this cultural heritage despite over a century of gradual decline in literacy following the Hispanization of the indigenous script.

Throughout 2025, there have been scores of activities commemorating the centennial of Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Indonesia’s most internationally translated literary figure. His novels have been translated into at least 49 languages. New foreign language editions in French and Chinese have recently appeared. Within Indonesia, however, his works are never, or extremely rarely, discussed in public schools. In the official or semi-official historical narrative of Indonesia, he was part of Indonesian society that was banned and marginalised. Pramoedya himself was 14 years in prison without charge from 1965 and his works, including the famous BUMI MANUSIA (This Earth of Mankind), published after his release from prison in 1979, was also banned. It was only after the fall of Suharto in 1998 that Pramoedya’s books could be purchased in a bookshop.