The 25th Cornell SEAP Graduate Student Conference

To be held in a hybrid format at the Kahin Center, welcoming early career scholars from Cornell and beyond.

Scholarship is forever a site of tension between the intellectual inheritance of one’s discipline and the magnificent potentiality of original research. Between opposing pulls of past and future we notch our arrows, set our sights, and take flight into newly imagined terrains of research, political struggle, and creative expression. On the occasion of the Cornell Southeast Asian Program (SEAP) Graduate Student Conference’s 25th anniversary, we reflect on origins, destinations, and all the hurdles in between.

This year’s theme—Crossing Boundaries, Sustaining Connections—calls for us to reflect on our positions as scholars of Southeast Asia. We make our own field, but we do not make it as we please. Climate change, authoritarian revanchism, pandemics, political polarization, new modes of association—these are problems which demand the adaptation of old tools for new ends. How can we connect with and draw on the collective heritage of Southeast Asian Studies without remaining bound by limitations given and transmitted from the past? We invite reflexive, boundary-transgressing, and/or connection-making submissions that arouse productive, future-oriented (re)consideration of the historical, geographical, and institutional heritage of Southeast Asian Studies.

The 25th SEAP Graduate Student Conference will be held in a hybrid format on 10–12 March, 2023 at Cornell University’s George McT. Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia in Ithaca, New York and on Zoom. The University’s COVID restrictions will apply and are subject to change. We welcome abstract submissions by 20 December 2022 of original work related to Southeast Asia by current graduate students. Scholars who have completed and defended a PhD prior to March 10, 2023 are not eligible.

Full conference schedule available here.

Join us at Friday, March 10th for the Conference Keynote at 430pm (registration at 4pm), with a reception to follow.

Jihyun Han (Ph.D. Candidate, History, Cornell University) leads this workshop.

This paper examines two layers of local history: Northeast China’s colonial experience in the 1930-the 1940s and local historians’ writing of it in the 1950-60s. In analyzing various forms of historical writings about Japanese occupation of the region published in the Mao-period Northeast, this paper argues that local historians developed a discourse strategy of obscuring the past. In obfuscating the enemy and blurring the colonial life of the people in the region, local historians went for three cognitive effects: negotiating locally unique colonial experience with the Chinese Communist Party’s master narrative of the Chinese Revolution; appropriating the concept of enemy in response to contemporary politics, and deferring judgment against everyday colonial compliance of the local people.

Introduction by Su-Yeon Seo (Ph.D. student, Asian Studies, Cornell University)Discussion by Tianyi Shou (Ph.D. candidate, Comparative Literature, Cornell University)

This lecture is organized by East Asia Program's Graduate Student Steering Committee (EAP-GSSC). The GSSC lecture is open to the public but RSVPs are encouraged. Please contact eap-gssc@cornell.edu for RSVPs and questions.

Join Feminist, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Program
for our Faculty Work Luncheon with
Durba Ghosh, Professor of History

FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17
12PM-1PM
190 Rockefeller Hall

My teaching and research focus on the history of British colonialism on the Indian subcontinent. I am the author of two books, and more than a dozen journal articles and book chapters; in one way or another, they all focus on the relationship between colonial agents, officials, and elites and those who were colonized. Since I arrived at Cornell in 2005, I have taught courses on modern South Asia, the British empire, gender, and colonialism. In Fall 2021, I will be teaching a new course on the Afterlives of 9/11 to think about the twentieth anniversary of this global historical event.

My recent book, Gentlemanly Terrorists, focuses on an underground radical political movement in early and mid-twentieth century India and the ways in which political violence against the British colonial state became an important, but historically underemphasized, form of protest. While Gandhi's nonviolent protest movements are often seen to be the hallmark of anticolonial protest, the book follows how the colonial state invested in security and emergency legislation to contain what they felt was an active terrorist threat. In the process of writing this book, I have become fascinated with the ways that political violence has become a central part of popular historical narratives.

My next project focuses on commemorations of freedom fighters, and the ways in which public monuments and statues to mark India's independence struggle have become a part of India's political landscape. As a part of that project, I am part of the new collaboration group "Unsettled Monuments, Unstable Heritage," funded by the Radical Collaborations initiative in the humanities.

I have written two short essays on the removal of statues in the last year: One in collaboration with Kelly King-O'Brien on the relationship between colonial and confederate statues. A more recent essay focuses on statues of Cecil Rhodes that were not installed.

At Cornell, I have been involved with the Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, the South Asia Program, the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies, the Society for the Humanities, the Institute for Social Sciences, the CIVIC initiative that emerged out of the Radical Collaborations projects. I currently serve on the Cornell University Press faculty board and am a member of the University Faculty Committee. Further afield, I have served on program and prize committees for the American Historical Association, American Institute of Indian Studies, Association of Asian Studies, Berkshire Conference of Women Historians, and North American Conference on British Studies.

Currently I am the inaugural director of a new program based in the College of Arts and Sciences, the Humanities Scholars Program.

Attendees are kindly requested to read "Revisiting Sex and the Family" in advance of the workshop.

RSVP for the workshop here.