About Us
The Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) was founded in 1950 to promote the acquisition and dissemination of knowledge about countries, cultures, and languages of the region.
SEAP's core and emeritus faculty members create a collective knowledge of Southeast Asia that amounts to one of the world’s greatest concentrations of expertise on the region. Six senior language lecturers teach four levels of study in Burmese, Indonesian, Khmer, Tagalog, Thai, and Vietnamese.
The U.S. Department of Education continuously recognized SEAP as a Title VI National Resource Center from 1958 until 2026, when federal changes ended NRC funding. For 68 years, SEAP trained experts on the region; met strategic national needs in government, business, science, and professional fields; and provided K–16 educational outreach. Related FLAS fellowships helped generations of Cornell students learn Southeast Asian languages.
SEAP has three unique resources:
- The John M. Echols Collection on Southeast Asia is the largest collection on the region, with over 500,000 monographs in 162 indigenous languages.
- The Kahin Center is an academic home to SEAP graduate students, visiting fellows and scholars, faculty members, and SEAP's publication and outreach offices.
- Via SEAP Publications, SEAP publishes Southeast Asian monographs and language textbooks, including the only journal exclusively on Indonesia, and provides open-access downloads of its Cornell Modern Indonesia Project (CMIP) and SEAP Data papers.