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.

Join the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University for a talk by Jack Jin Gary Lee, Assistant Professor of Sociology at The New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School. Dr. Lee will discuss the 1938 case of a magistrate who was suspected by colonial officials in Singapore and London of having homosexual relations with colonial subjects.

Join Vietnamese Boat People (VBP) and Think!Chinatown Studio for a Story Slam in which Vietnamese Americans share their journey of migration, identity, love, loss, healing, and discovery. The event is preceded by a reception and an introduction by VBP’s Founder, Tracey Nguyễn Mang.

Join the Asian American Resource Center, the Center for Burma Studies, and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Elizabeth Rhoads, Senior Lecturer at the Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies at Lund University, Sweden. Professor Rhoads will discuss the influence of conflict and displacement on statelessness and barriers to acquiring and holding citizenship in Myanmar.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at University of Hawai‘i (UH) at Mānoa for a talk by Dr. Muhammad Suhail Mohamed Yazid, Fellow at the Harvard University Asia Center, as he discusses his latest book He Who is Made Lord. Dr. Barbara Watson Andaya, Emerita Professor of Asian Studies at UH-Mānoa, will moderate the discussion.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Center for Burma Studies at Northern Illinois University for a talk by Hitomi Fujimura, Humanities Lecturer at Ehime University in Japan, who will discuss the history of Karen Baptists in British Burma and the United States.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UH-Mānoa for the virtual book launch of  Halo-Halo Ecologies, an anthology that gathers a transnational community of food enthusiasts, engaged scholars, and social and environmental activists to reimagine Philippine Studies and Food Studies. Speakers include Dr. Alyssa Paredes, Dr. Marvin Montefrio, Felice Prudente Sta. Maria, Chef Giney Villar, and Paolo Ven B. Paculan.

Join Deconstructing Indonesia, a student-led group, for a discussion of the National Revolution of Indonesia with a focus on the clashing writings of two giants of the revolution: Sutan Sjahrir and Tan Malaka.

Join the Asian American Education Project for a workshop that explores Asian  Immigration to the United States, and the past and present challenges faced by immigrants. The workshop will be facilitated by Laura Ouk, board president of the National Cambodian Heritage Museum and board member for the Cambodian Association of Illinois.

Join the Council on Southeast Asia Studies at Yale University for a talk by Barbara Watson Andaya, Emerita Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, and Leonard Y. Andaya, Emeritus Professor of History at UH-Mānoa. As co-editors of the third volume of The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, they will discuss the challenges of placing contemporary concerns of Southeast Asian studies in a historical framework.

Join the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at University of Michigan for a talk by Dr. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez, Assistant Professor of History at University of California, Santa Cruz. Dr. Gutierrez will discuss the first decades of U.S. colonization in the Philippines and institutions of botanical research aimed to scale up plantation-style production.

Over the past several weeks we’ve worked towards the idea of Indonesia with a colorful cast of characters: our Kartinis, Ki Hajars, and Sukarnos, luminaries of that class that “dreamt and prayed in Dutch.” But what of the vast majority of Indonesians that didn’t? Who spoke in the language of jimats and Imam Mahdis rather than treatises and political theories? This week we begin to tell their side of the story, and of how they mobilized for that decisive act of political creation: the National Revolution itself.

Join the Southeast Asia Program at Cornell University for a talk by Ian Baird, Professor of Geography and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Dr. Baird will discuss the enduring legacy of the House of Champassak, a royal lineage from southern Laos that has navigated centuries of political upheaval, from Thai vassalage and French colonialism to Lao independence and communist rule.