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.

Join the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop for a workshop on making prints, using letterpress and risograph technologies, to collectively produce a zine or short monograph. This workshop includes a brief introduction by Rianne Subijanto, Associate Professor of Communication Studies at Baruch College-CUNY, and Meghan Forbes, author of Technologies for the Revolution: The Czech Avant-Garde in Print. This event will highlight histories of print culture from Indonesia to Czechoslovakia a century ago, in which the working class and avant-garde artists utilized printed matter and modern channels of communication to push for an anti-capitalist, anti-colonial future.

Join the Indonesia Institute at Australian National University (ANU) for their annual Human Rights Day panel, which brings together experts with deep knowledge of the historical evolutions of human rights activism and protections, from independence to the present day. Speakers include: Sidney Jones (NYSEAN and NYU), Dede Oetemo (GAYa NUSANTARA Foundation), Usman Hamid (Amnesty International Indonesia), and Robert Cribb (ANU). Dyah Ayu Kartika, PhD candidate in the Department of Political and Social Change at ANU, will moderate the discussion.

Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University for a panel exploring Chinese migration to 20th-century Malaya and contemporary Singapore. Panelists include Zach Howlett, Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at National University of Singapore; Wen Li Thian, PhD student at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations; and Darren Wan, History PhD student at Cornell. Shaoling Ma, Associate Professor of Asian Studies, will moderate the panel.

Join the Weatherhead East Asian Institute at Columbia University and NYSEAN for a talk by Nicolas Weber, Professor of Vietnam Studies at the Fulbright University of Vietnam, who will discuss a 19th-century Cham verse narrative—The Rhyme of Looking Forward. Read as a “living archive,” it restores Cham perspectives and memory to the making of modern Southeast Asia.

Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University for a talk by Kevin D. Pham, Assistant Professor of Political Theory at the University of Amsterdam. Dr. Pham will discuss how revolutionaries in Vietnam debated the value of free speech. Drawing on the writings of the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm (NVGP), a movement of intellectuals who proclaimed support for free speech and communist revolution in North Vietnam in the late 1950s, Pham shows how the NVGP defend free speech as a collective right, rather than an individual one, and as something that can invigorate the Party so that it can more effectively guide the people towards socialism.

Join the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale for a talk by Michele Thompson, Professor of History at Southern Connecticut State University and NYSEAN Member. Dr. Thompson will share an overview of the Vietnamese Buddhist involvement in health care and the changes in Vietnam that resulted in a resurgence of Buddhist political and medical activity, culminating in the Buddhist protests of the 1960s.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Benjamin Tausig, Associate Professor of Critical Music Studies at Stony Brook University, who will discuss his book on Maurice Rocco, a queer Black American jazz pianist who was murdered in 1976 in Bangkok. The talk explores how Rocco’s life and death reflect profound shifts in the definitions and valuations of race, sex, and gender identity in Cold War-era Thailand.

Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell for a talk by Marlie Lukach, PhD student in Plant Breeding and Genetics, who will discuss the historical significance of bottle gourd lagenaria siceraria in Southeast Asia.

Join the UCLA Center for Southeast Asian Studies for a talk by Jane M. Ferguson, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Southeast Asian History at the Australian National University. Dr. Ferguson will discuss the differences in Burmese remakes of Hollywood movies under the parliamentary democracy years (1948-1962) and under the socialist era (1962-1988), exploring the “remake” as a cultural predictor for Burmese engagement with global cinema.

Join NYSEAN for a book talk by Chiara Formichi, H. Stanley Krusten Professor of World Religions in the Department of Asian Studies. Domestic Nationalism argues that Muslim women in Java and Sumatra, from the late 1910s to the 1950s, were central to Indonesia’s progress as guardians and promoters of health and piety through gendered activities of care work.

Join NYSEAN and Sulo: The Philippine Studies Initiative at NYU for a talk by Dr. Oona Paredes, Associate Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA’s Department of Asian Languages and Cultures, who will discuss how a team of Higaunon people transformed their oral tradition into written form.

Join the Yale Council on Southeast Asia Studies for a talk by Pamela Nguyen Corey, Associate Professor of Art History at Fulbright University Vietnam. In this talk, she looks at metaphor as an artistic method that emphasizes temporal and tacit dimensions of regional imagination, using the 2023 Thailand Biennale in Chiang Rai and artworks by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Nguyen Trinh Thi as case studies.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at NIU and the Philippine Consulate General of Chicago for a presentation by Ambeth Ocampo, Professor of History at Ateneo de Manila University, who will discuss how people have utilized the history of the Philippines for better or worse.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University (NIU) for a talk by Kanjana Thepboriruk, Associate Professor at NIU’s Department of World Languages and Cultures, who will discuss her work conducting oral history interviews with Thai Americans.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies for a talk by Mu'izz Abdul Khalid, a Research Associate at the Global Awareness and Impact Alliance, who will discuss the paradoxical status Bruneians face as both citizens and subjects of Brunei, the last absolutist kingdom in Southeast Asia. With their hybrid status, Khalid argues Bruneians are compelled to constantly negotiate their political lives, balancing their status as subjects with subtle acts of citizenship, often in the form of “quiet activism.”

Join the Thirdworld Newsreel and the Documentary Forum at City College of New York for a screening and discussion of the documentary film Because of You: A History of Kilawin Kolektibo by Desireena Almoradie and Barbara Malaran. The screening will be followed by a talkback with the co-directors and fellow past participants of Kilawin Kolektibo.