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.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dwi Noverini Djenar, Associate Professor and Chair of the Indonesian Studies Department at The University of Sydney, who will discuss the exonerative accounts in political discourse.

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

This talk is co-sponsored by the Departments of Linguistics and Government.

About the Talk

Studies on accounts within the conversation analytic and interactional linguistic traditions have pointed out the difficulties in approaching exonerative accounts as categories within a taxonomy or as speech acts. These studies suggest, for example, that there is no determinable family of exonerations, that any level of a category can be realized in a myriad of ways, and that any word or expression can be the candidate of the category, and as such exonerations cannot be nailed down to certain words or expressions. Analysts suggest instead to view exonerations as explanations given when people are in some trouble or facing some kind of accusation, and that it is through examining their place in sequence that we can understand how exonerative effects are produced. In this talk, I discuss such effects by considering a succession of speech events that take the form of political interviews. In such events talk is normatively oriented to the public and participants contribute relative to their roles as interviewer and interviewee. While divergences from the norm may not lead to serious social consequences, the reverse may also occur, where an interview may become an occasion for contesting moral norms. Implicated within such an occasion are not only the participants from whose turns at talk exonerations emerge but also the audience who participate in moral negotiation by commenting on what has been said – including through labeling – and circulating their comments beyond the event. The Indonesian interviews studied here show that adopting a third-person’ perspective in referring to oneself and inviting others to participate in the exonerative talk are among the neutralization techniques adopted by participants. A methodological implication from the study is that structural analysis (i.e., based on sequence) needs to be complemented by a reflexive-semiotic perspective to better reflect the participation framework within political interviews.

About the Speaker

Novi Djenar is an Associate Professor in Indonesian Studies at the University of Sydney. Her research interests lie in questions related to the way language facilitates understanding of sociocultural and political ideas, including ideas about self-other relations, identity, and style. Novi has published in the areas of discourse and pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and grammar, focusing on Indonesian. Her book Style and Intersubjectivity in Youth Interaction (with M. Ewing and H. Manns) approaches the study of youth interaction through the concept of sociability. Her current research draws on the semiotic-reflexive approach for analyzing self-addressee reference (developed with Jack Sidnell in Signs of Deference, Signs of Demeanour: Interlocutor Reference and Self-Other Relations Across Southeast Asian Speech Communities) to examine how Indonesians argue and give explanations in public.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Dr. Hieu Phung, Assistant Professor of Vietnamese and Southeast Asian History at the Asian Languages and Cultures Department at Rutgers-New Brunswick University, who will discuss state-building in the Red River region.

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

The Red River is not the most impressive in Southeast Asia, but it has a richly recorded hydrosocial profile. Its lower basin has been occupied not only by a large population but also by the centuries-old political center of the Vietnamese since the eleventh century. Like Angkor in the Lower Mekong and Pagan in the Middle Ayeyarwady, early Vietnamese states established their political centers in the Red River’s mid-river region. By the fifteenth century, however, as the loci of power in other river basins moved towards the coast, the new leaders of Dai Viet, the Le dynasty, sustained the mid-river center and used it to extend their influence over the uplands, the coast, and nearby smaller river basins. This talk explores the relationship between large rivers and state-building by analyzing the evolution of the Red River dike system. As all rivers in monsoonal Asia are seasonal, building a state dependent on river resources requires effective policies concerning weather and climate dynamics. The Le sponsorship of river embankments continued a flood control strategy that had emerged several centuries earlier at the peak of the Medieval Climate Anomaly. This commitment also embraced a new perception of dike building. It matched the state’s expansionist policy on reclamation and rice production as the climate became drier during the transition to the Little Ice Age. The Red River dikes have been maintained for centuries but their impacts on the environmental, social, and cultural systems have constantly shifted.

About the Speaker

Hieu Phung (Assistant Professor, Rutgers-New Brunswick) is an environmental historian who investigates the impacts of local culture and statecraft on the preindustrial environment, especially on water and climate. Her research delves into the history of Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the transition from the Medieval Climate Anomaly (c. 800/950–1250/1300) to the Little Ice Age (c. 1300–1850). Her study of environmental history also involves the analysis of space, maps, and texts to uncover the construction of premodern geographic knowledge. She has written about the rivers and climate history of premodern Vietnam and Southeast Asia and is currently working on her book, Heavenly Drought: Natural Anomalies and State-Building in Dai Viet, Eleventh to Sixteenth Centuries.

Gatty Lecture Series

This talk has been rescheduled from October 17, 2024 to January 30, 2025.

Join us for a talk by Joshua Babcock, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Brown University, who will discuss the raciolinguistic distinctiveness and national identity in Singapore.

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

This talk is co-sponsored by the Department of Science & Technology Studies.

About the Talk

What distinctions are desirable? What do distinctions desire? This talk revisits W.J.T. Mitchell’s famous provocation in “What do pictures want?” (2005), ethnographically exploring the infrastructures of experience (Gilmore 2023) that shape the felt necessity of and desires for raciolinguistic distinctiveness (Babcock 2023; Rosa and Flores 2017; Lo and Chun 2020) in Singapore in the aftermath of “Asian Values,” multiply institutionalized “Mother Tongue” pedagogies, and the global rise of place-branding regimes. Against arguments of cruel optimism—a desire for things that are obstacles to one’s flourishing (Berlant 2011)—and Singaporeanness-as-absence (Chua 1998), I show how racial community gets performed, policed, and blocked through everyday communicative activity amid three-dimensional fictions (Watson 2011) of multiracial-multilingualism as national identity. I elaborate a desire-based framework (Tuck and Yang 2014) that moves beyond totalizing images and foregrounds the horizons toward which people in Singapore strive even when working through totalizing images—acts of striving that imagine new horizons beyond the coercive community ideals that uphold and are upheld by genres of postcolonial capitalism (Naruse 2023) in the island city-state and beyond.

About the Speaker

Joshua Babcock is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and affiliate faculty in the programs in Linguistics and STS at Brown University. His current book project, Image and the Total Utopia: Desiring Distinctions in Multiracial, Multilingual Singapore explores how technology, language, and race co-naturalize one another across scales to shape the conditions of possibility for belonging to the image of Singapore. In his emerging work, he studies the Singapore Sling, U.S. school board politics (with Ilana Gershon), and a ghost town called Singapore, Michigan. Josh is also the Communications Director for the General Anthropology Division of the American Anthropological Association.

Gatty Lecture Series

Join us for a talk by Daena Funahashi, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley, who will discuss constitutional change and political legitimacy in Thailand.

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

In 2017 Thailand launched yet another constitution – its twentieth in less than a century. Contra a common perspective among political scientists that the cycle of coups followed by constitution writing in Thailand points to a “failure” of democracy, I examine this cycle as one that successfully renders political legitimacy visible as the vanishing point of politics. As I see it, what the century of Thai political conflict teaches us is that the problem of legitimacy is one that cannot and should not be laid to rest. Based on ethnographic and archival work I began in 2011, I argue in this talk that legitimacy is a question most animated at moments when old notions are toppled, and the new codifications of legitimacy are yet to emerge. Here, I put forth an idea of legitimacy as that which emerges through being toppled, rather than on being constituted.

About the Speaker

Daena Funahashi is a political and economic anthropologist interested in examining the interstice between speech and speechlessness, between what is possible to make legible and what resists articulation. She has written on issues of scientific authority, political legitimacy, and democracy in Thailand. Beyond Southeast Asia, she is the author of Untimely Sacrifices: Work and Death in Finland (Cornell University Press, 2023). In it, Funahashi brings classic anthropological scholarship on exchange and sacrifice to bear on contemporary concerns with labor, labor’s attritional force such as burnout, and the future of state welfare. She is a member of the Center for Southeast Asia Studies (CSEAS) and The Program in Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley.