From the beginning of the student-led quota reform movement on June 6th across the creation of an interim government upon the resignation of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina on August 5th, a lot has been happening in Bangladesh recently. This virtual panel brings together scholars in New York and activists in Bangladesh to help add personal texture and academic analysis to the headlines and provide an opportunity for questions and discussion. What has happened? What does this mean for Bangladesh and the region? What might come next?

Participants in this virtual roundtable organized by the Cornell-Syracuse South Asia Consortium include:

Farhana Sultana, Professor of Geography, Syracuse UniversityDina M. Siddiqi, Clinical Professor, Global Liberal Studies, New York UniversityMuhib Rahman, Postdoctoral Associate in Government, Cornell UniversityKazi Farzana Shoily, PhD Candidate in History, Syracuse UniversityTasnuva Helal Bidita, Student and Human Rights & Climate Activist, BangladeshAmmar Bin Asad, Student, Photographer, and Activist, Jagannath University, BangladeshModerated by Mona Bhan, Ford-Maxwell Professor of South Asian Studies & Director, South Asia Center, Syracuse University

Photo by Rayhan Ahmed

The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies funds international graduate student research!

Research travel grants provide international travel support for graduate and professional students to conduct short-term research or fieldwork outside the United States.

Global PhD Research Awards fund fieldwork for 9 to 12 months of dissertation research.

Register for the virtual session.

Can’t attend? Contact einaudi_center@einaudi.cornell.edu.

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The Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies hosts info sessions for graduate and for undergraduate students to learn more about funding opportunities, international travel, research, and internships. View the full calendar of fall semester sessions.

atty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dr. Kathryn "Kitsie" Emerson from EKALAYA Arts Cente, who will discuss the social critique in Javanese wayang. Dr. Emerson obtained PhD from the Leiden Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University. Currently, Dr. Emerson serves as the Director of Ekalaya Performing Arts Center in Central Java, Indonesia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Many foreign observers, scholars, and students of Javanese wayang kulit know that an important aspect of this complex performance art is social critique and commentary. But how exactly does the dhalang deliver such criticism? In this lecture, I will introduce participants to a wayang story (lakon) written by the legendary Ki Anom Soeroto in the 1970s, meant to be relevant to the times and to support a certain agenda, entitled Semar Mbangun Kahyangan (Semar Builds His Own Heavens). To this day, this lakon is one of the most popular stories performed in Java, but it turns out to also be flexible. Any dhalang can easily insert his/her own vision of utopia into the fabric of the tale. We will look at how the late Ki Mujoko Joko Raharjo adapted the lakon in the late 1980s, embedding a very different idealism and social commentary to Ki Anom Soeroto’s. We will also examine how Ki Purbo Asmoro recently (July 2024) took on the challenge, of reworking Semar Mbangun Kahyangan to reflect his own hopes and dreams for the Javanese people. By examining the nature of social critique in these three examples, participants will gain an understanding of how the role of the dhalang as a revered advisor works in current-day wayang performance practice.

About the Speaker

Kathryn “Kitsie” Emerson, an alumnus of Cornell’s Music Department (1983), is the director of Ekalaya, a performance-study institute in Java, Indonesia. She has been immersed in the study of gamelan and wayang performance practice for over 30 years in Java. In 2005 she pioneered—and continues to be the sole practitioner of—a unique method for translating wayang kulit performances for foreign audiences. Her technique allows for simultaneous interpretation while the performance is unfolding, respecting the need for spontaneity on the part of the dhalang. She has worked with over 60 different dhalang in this capacity, and across four continents—most recently on a six-week tour to Central Europe with the renowned Ki Purbo Asmoro. Her recent book: Innovation, Style and Spectacle in Wayang: Purbo Asmoro’s Evolution of an Indonesian Performing Art (NUS and University of Chicago Press, 2022), examines innovations in the dramatic structure of Solonese wayang from 1960 to 2020 and won the 2024 UNIMA USA Nancy Staub Award. Originally from Kalamazoo, Michigan, she is married to master gamelan musician Wakidi Dwidjomartono of Solo, Central Java.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Nielson Sophann Hul, PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Cornell University, who will discuss the implosives in Khmer.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

Implosives are a class of consonants characterized by their unique articulation and acoustic properties. Despite their linguistic significance, their detailed analysis in Khmer, a language with a notable presence of these sounds, remains underexplored. This study aims to fill this gap by providing a comprehensive analysis of implosive consonants in Khmer. The primary objective of this research is to analyze the acoustic properties of implosives in Khmer and to understand how these properties compare to those of other consonant types within the language. We also aim to explore how implosives interact with other phonetic variables. Acoustic data were collected from native Khmer speakers in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; Long Beach, California; and Seattle, Washington focusing on implosive consonants in various phonetic contexts. Using advanced acoustic analysis techniques, including spectral and temporal measurements, I examined the characteristics of implosives. The analysis revealed distinct acoustic signatures for Khmer implosives, including specific patterns in spectral frequency and temporal duration. Significant variations were observed based on phonetic context, with differences in implosive characteristics across word positions and speaking rates. These findings highlight the complexity of implosive articulation in Standard Khmer and its interaction with other phonetic features as well as that of the American diasporic varieties of Khmer. This research provides new insights into the acoustic properties of implosives in Khmer, contributing to a deeper understanding of their role in the language's phonetic inventory. The findings have implications for both theoretical phonetics and practical applications, such as speech synthesis and language teaching.

About the Speaker

Nielson Sophann Hul was born in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge period and escaped to the United States of America when he was very young. After High School, he joined the U.S. Army and deployed during OIF/OEF as a Combat Medic. During his breaks in service, Nielson graduated from UCLA with a BA in English Literature and the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa with an MA in Linguistics. He is currently working toward his PhD in Linguistics at Cornell and is interested in the acoustic phonetics of laryngeal sounds in Khmer.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Seng Guo-Quan, Assistant Professor of History National University of Singapore, who will discuss the gendered history of the Chinese settler community in Indonesia.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of History. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

In Strangers in the Family, Guo-Quan Seng provides a gendered history of settler Chinese community formation in Indonesia during the Dutch colonial period (1816–1942). At the heart of this story lies the creolization of patrilineal Confucian marital and familial norms to the colonial legal, moral, and sexual conditions of urban Java. Departing from male-centered narratives of Overseas Chinese communities, Strangers in the Family tells the history of community- formation from the perspective of women who were subordinated to, and alienated from full Chinese selfhood. From native concubines and mothers, creole Chinese daughters, and wives and matriarchs, to the first generation of colonial-educated feminists, Seng showcases women’s moral agency as they negotiated, manipulated, and debated men in positions of authority over their rights in marriage formation and dissolution. In dialogue with critical studies of colonial Eurasian intimacies, this book explores Asian-centered inter-ethnic patterns of intimate encounters. It shows how contestations over women’s place in marriage and in society were formative of Chinese racial identity in colonial Indonesia.

About the Speaker

Seng Guo-Quan is a historian of Chinese societies in Southeast Asia, with a special interest in race, gender, and sexuality structures in the region, and how they have been shaped through the forces of imperialism, nationalism, and global capitalism. Strangers in the Family: Gender, Patriliny, and the Chinese in Colonial Indonesia (Cornell University Press, November 2023) is his first single-authored monograph. He has also published in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Indonesia, and the Journal of Chinese Overseas. This is his first single-authored monograph. He is now working on a second book tentatively titled, “A Diaspora of Shopkeepers: Empire, Race and Chinese Commercial Expansion in Southeast Asia (1870-1970s)”.

Speaker: R. Kenji Tierney Anthropology, SUNY New Paltz
Introduced by Jane Marie Law, Asian Studies, Cornell

What is the place of sumo in the 21st century? Rather than an "unchanging tradition," sumo acts as a mirror to the changing social conditions in Japanese society. Occupying a contenious role within the overlapping cultural spaces of tradition and sport, debates around the bodies, public morality, and globalization become articulated through scandals and moral panics surrounding the wrestlers, their conduct, and their futures. This talk looks at bodies, food, and scandals to explore these issues.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Lawrence Chua, Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University, who will discuss the colonial museum practices.

This Gatty Lecture will take place at the The Kahin Center, 640 Stewart Ave. Lunch will be served. For questions, contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

About the Talk

This lecture examines the conjoined genealogies of the Musée Albert Sarraut (Phnom Penh, 1920) and the National Museum of Bangkok (1927). The architecture of both museums embraced conflicting temporalities: their ground plans sought to map out the respective times and spaces of Cambodge and Siam while their façades drew on local historicist idioms to make claims about cultural purity. Embedded within two sometimes competitive, sometimes cooperative imperial projects, both withdrew heterogeneous sacred images from the realm of religious practice and embedded them within a new economy of image production and a new culture of public exhibition. As instruments in the colonial production of difference, the two museums thus fulfilled three major roles: they spatialized a history of Siam and Cambodge as two distinct states, both threatened by disappearance; they exhibited the antiquities of these states to a racialized public as evidence of that race’s unique origins; and they were part of a new economic and educational system that sought to transform “worldmaking” into a rationalized form of production that reduced powerful tools of imagining to objets d’art and imbued them with a serial identity.

About the Speaker

Lawrence Chua is the author of Bangkok Utopia: Modern Architecture and Buddhist Felicities, 1910-1973. His scholarship on the history of Asian architecture and the built environment has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Urban History, Architectural Histories, South East Asia Research, อ่าน, October, and Platform. He is a founding member of the queer artist of color-led arts organization, Denniston Hill and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians and positions: asia critique. He is also co-editor of the book series "ArchAsia" for Hong Kong University Press. He has been the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies as well as research fellowships at the Getty Center, the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University, the International Institute of Asian Studies at Leiden University, and the Center for Khmer Studies. He has taught at Chulalongkorn University, New York University, and Hamilton College. He is currently associate professor in the School of Architecture, Syracuse University.