Maria Cristina Garcia, a 2016 Andrew Carnegie Fellow, studies refugees, immigrants, and exiles. While Garcia considers herself primarily a historian of 20th-century U.S. history, her interest in displaced and mobile populations has increasingly blurred the geographic borders of her work.

Her most recent book, State of Disaster: The Failure of U.S. Migration Policy in an Age of Climate Change (University of North Carolina Press, 2022), was awarded an honorable mention in the Immigration and Ethnic History Society's Theodore Saloutos Book Prize.

Kaja McGowan’s studies the reciprocal relationships between neighboring countries in South and Southeast Asia. Her research explores the flow of ideas and artifacts along this highway—architecture, bronzes, textiles, ceramics, performance traditions, and visualizations of texts like Panji Malat, the Ramayana, and the Mahabharata. The reciprocal flow accounts for the shaping of ideas and the development of styles across vast geographical and historical distances.

Geographic Research Area: India and Indonesia

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interests: Sanskrit poetics, text interpretation, and Buddhist studies

Geographic Research Area: Nepal and the Himalayas

Teaching/Research Interests: Gender, ethnicity, religion and culture

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interests: Sustainable economic development, intertemporal decentralization, dynamical systems, and allocation theory and international trade theory

Geographic Research Area: India

Teaching/Research Interests: Urbanization, planning theory, research methods, transborder/transdiscipline engaged learning

Geographic Research Area: India and United States

Teaching/Research Interests: Incarceration, political activism, ethnic activism, and gender

Research Interests: Historical linguistics, lexicography, Austronesian linguistics

Karim-Aly Kassam's research interests include human and environmental relations and indigenous ways of knowing.

James Siegel retired from full-time teaching in 2007. He is the last of the second-generation SEAP faculty to retire. Like other emeritus SEAP faculty, he retains an office at the Kahin Center and is available to help mentor future scholars of Southeast Asia.