Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series.

Geoffrey Robinson, Department of History, UCLA

Geoffrey Robinson is a Professor of History at UCLA, where he teaches and writes about political violence, genocide, and human rights, especially in Southeast Asia. His major works include: The Dark Side of Paradise: Political Violence in Bali; East Timor 1999: Crimes against Humanity; If You Leave Us Here, We Will Die: How Genocide Was Stopped in East Timor; and The Killing Season: A History of the Indonesian Massacres, 1965-66. Robinson earned his BA at McGill University and his PhD at Cornell, where he was a student of Benedict Anderson and George Kahin. Before coming to UCLA in 1997, he worked for six years at Amnesty International’s Research Department in London, and in 1999 he served as a Political Affairs Officer with the United Nations in East Timor. His current projects include a co-authored visual history of the mass violence of 1965-66 in Indonesia; and a study of the “Swedish Connection” to those events.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Gatty Lectures will be held in-person at the Kahin Center, with the option to attend virtually as well. To attend virtually, please register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJcpduqoqDotG9E2aXkRLcYonZdd0V….

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series.

Andrew Weintraub, Department of Music, University of Pittsburgh

Andrew N. Weintraub is Professor of Music at the University of Pittsburgh, where he teaches graduate and undergraduate courses in ethnomusicology and popular music and directs the University Gamelan program. He is the author of Power Plays (2004) and Dangdut Stories (2010), editor of Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia (2011), and co-editor of Music and Cultural Rights (2008) and Vamping the Stage (2017). Weintraub is the founder and lead singer of the Dangdut Cowboys, a Pittsburgh-based band that plays Indonesian popular music.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Please note that this talk will not be held in person at the Kahin Center, and will take place on Zoom. Members of the SEAP community are welcome to come to the Kahin Center to watch the Zoom event together. To attend virtually, please register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAocOqrrDktHNPFkrd24i3ECyRoEs….

Beverages will be served outside before the talk, and in accordance with current Cornell guidance we will be wearing masks indoors. Feel free to bring your own brownbag lunch and eat outside with us before the talk.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series.

Sandy Chang, Department of History, University of Florida

Sandy F. Chang is an assistant professor in Modern Asian History at the University of Florida. She specializes in Chinese migration, gender, and sexuality studies in Southeast Asia and the British Empire. Her scholarly areas of interest also include global China, inter-Asian connections, modern border regimes, women’s history, and comparative colonialisms. She is currently working on a book project, Across the South Seas: Gender, Intimacy, and Chinese Migration to British Malaya, 1877-1941 that explores the border-crossing journeys of over a million Chinese women and their intimate lives across the Malay Peninsula. She received her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Gatty Lectures will be held in-person at the Kahin Center, with the option to attend virtually as well. To attend virtually, please register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJArdOuhrDkpHNx7g2ky3ZfuJ_N1ej….

Beverages will be served outside before the talk, and in accordance with current Cornell guidance we will be wearing masks indoors. Feel free to bring your own brownbag lunch and eat outside with us before the talk.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series.

Sara Ann Swenson, Department of Religion, Dartmouth

Sara Ann Swenson researches contemporary Buddhism in Vietnam. Her current work examines rising trends of Buddhist volunteerism in Vietnam’s fastest growing urban area, Ho Chi Minh City. Drawing on twenty months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019, she explores how lay and monastic Buddhist charity workers coped with experiences of urban alienation by framing altruism as an intersubjective act that benefits all beings. Her scholarship shows how Buddhist practices fundamentally inform a shift toward grassroots social service programming in Vietnam amid increasing economic privatization. Swenson's research has been published in The Journal of Global Buddhism, The Journal of Vietnamese Studies, Political Theology, and the Journal of Theology & Sexuality. Her work has been funded through the Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship; Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad (DDRA); and The Robert H. N. Ho Family Foundation Dissertation Fellowship in Buddhist Studies, awarded through the American Council of Learned Societies. Swenson completed her Ph.D. in Religion from Syracuse University in 2021. She holds an M.Phil. in Religion (Syracuse University, 2016), a Certificate of Advanced Study in Women’s and Gender Studies (Syracuse University, 2015), an M.A. in Comparative Religion (Iliff School of Theology, 2012), and a B.A. in English (University of Minnesota Duluth, 2009)

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Gatty Lectures will be held in-person at the Kahin Center, with the option to attend virtually as well. To attend virtually, please register at

https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJIoduyuqDssGtVvvlSO4gwT3ujt5q….

Beverages will be served outside before the talk, and in accordance with current Cornell guidance we will be wearing masks indoors. Feel free to bring your own brownbag lunch and eat outside with us before the talk.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series.

Joshua Plotnik, Department of Psychology, Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York

Joshua Plotnik, Ph.D. is a comparative psychologist who has studied elephants in Thailand since 2007. Recently, Dr. Plotnik has been working with students and colleagues to understand how research on animal behavior and cognition can be applied directly to the mitigation of human-wildlife conflict. He received his Ph.D. from Emory University, and was a Newton International Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He is now an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York in New York City (www.elephantlab.org). He is also the founder of Think Elephants International (www.thinkelephants.org), a U.S. non-profit charity focused on conservation education in the U.S. and Thailand. Dr. Plotnik is a member of the IUCN Human-Wildlife Conflict Task Force and the IUCN Asian Elephant Specialist Group.

Please note that this talk will not be held in person at the Kahin Center, and will take place on Zoom. Members of the SEAP community are welcome to come to the Kahin Center to watch the Zoom event together.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

To attend virtually, please register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwsduypqDsvHtbE6HJ4O-V9UQk6c7….

Beverages will be served outside before the talk, and in accordance with current Cornell guidance we will be wearing masks indoors. Feel free to bring your own brownbag lunch and eat outside with us before the talk.

Part of the Ronald and Janette Gatty Lecture Series.

Thomas Pepinsky, Department of Government and Brooks School of Public Policy, Cornell University

Thomas Pepinsky is the Walter F. LaFeber Professor in the Department of Government and School of Public Policy at Cornell University and Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He specializes in comparative politics and international political economy, with a focus on emerging markets in Southeast Asia. Among other works, he is the author of “Context and Method in Southeast Asian Politics,” “Migrants, Minorities, and Populism in Southeast Asia,” “Colonial Migration and the Origins of Governance: Theory and Evidence from Java," and Piety and Public Opinion: Understanding Indonesian Islam (with Bill Liddle and Saiful Mujani). He regularly teaches the Southeast Asian Politics course at Cornell, as well as general courses on comparative politics and political economy, and he is currently working on issues relating to identity, politics, and political economy in comparative and international politics.

For questions, please contact seapgatty@cornell.edu.

Gatty Lectures will be held in-person at the Kahin Center, with the option to attend virtually as well. To attend virtually, please register at https://cornell.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAtcu-hrjIoHddMh2NaIfnh3pu2g-….

Beverages will be served outside before the talk, and in accordance with current Cornell guidance we will be wearing masks indoors. Feel free to bring your own brownbag lunch and eat outside with us before the talk.

This session will provide PhD students with information on the Einaudi Dissertation Proposal Development Program. The program offers seminars, workshops, and faculty mentoring to PhD students in the social sciences and humanities who are developing research projects abroad or domestic research projects on topics that connect to global issues. Students receive up to $5,000 for summer research. Workshop and seminar costs are also covered.

Contact: programming@einaudi.cornell.edu

Aesthetics and Ethics of Return: Trauma, Militarism and Modernities in Southeast Asia

Arguing for an ethics of return, the book Return Engagements is a political-economic critique of the nation-state, wars then and now, and global art markets, with a focus on Việt Nam and Cambodia. Artist, curator, and critic Việt Lê points out that artists of Southeast Asian descent are often expected to address the twin traumas of armed conflict and modernization on international art markets.

By returning to and refashioning the specters of military engagements and modernity, Dr. Lê argues in this talk that artists such as Sopheap Pich and Phan Quang employ “strategic cartographies” in ways that allow them to reinvent such aesthetics and discursive spaces.

Việt Lê is an artist, academic and curator whose work centers on spiritualities, trauma, representation, and sexualities with a focus on Southeast Asia and its diasporas. He is an Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the California College of the Arts.

He is the author of Return Engagements: Contemporary Art’s Traumas of Modernity and History in Sài Gòn and Phnom Penh (Duke University Press, 2021) and coauthor, White Gaze (2nd edition, w/ Latipa [née Michelle Dizon]; Sming Sming Books, 2019). He is a board member of Art Matters and the Queer Culture Center.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Visual Culture Colloquium

Tuesday, September 14, 2021 at 4:45pm

Min Ma Naing

Beyond Burmese Esthetics

Physical Event

Goldwin Smith Hall, G22

“I don’t find Burmese esthetics in your work.” This is a critique that Min Ma Naing, a photographer from Myanmar, has often received from international curators and editors. Living through dictatorships, conflicts, restrictive social norms, she and other local photographers have endured surviving in Myanmar. In her practice she seeks to challenge the idea of what Burmese esthetics is. In this talk, she will share the journeys of photographers who tell the inside stories of Myanmar, and with her photography, open the door to a conversation about what Burmese esthetics can be.

Bio:

Min Ma Naing is a personal documentary photographer from Myanmar, who was based in Yangon till June 2021. Starting out as a press photographer, she realized that short-term assignments are not for her. She then decided to focus on stories around love and hatred. She is also interested in making photobooks as art objects and has made a few books for herself and her art collective. She has adopted the temporary pseudonym “Min Ma Naing” because of the political situation in Myanmar. It means “The King Cannot Beat You”.

Image Credit: Min Ma Naing (pseudonym)

Image caption: “Untitled”, 2021, from the Faces of Change series, Yangon, Myanmar

“First, I felt angry, but I became sad as soon as I heard the news of the coup. But my anger eventually beat my sadness. We have lost our youth, dreams, hopes, and our loved ones in this revolution. Whenever I feel sad or weak in this long war, I am driven by my anger to carry on. I will be carrying this anger until we win.” - Social Worker, 27