Our people
SEAC creates such a vibrant intellectual community by connecting scholars with diverse interests and tackling issues critical in our times.
Prof John Sidel, Centre Director
Professor John Sidel is Director of the Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre, and Sir Patrick Gillam Chair in International and Comparative Politics (Department of Government, and Department of International Relations).
He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia (2021). Please visit Prof Sidel's personal webpage here to learn more about his research.
Learn more about Prof Sidel in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series.
Read Prof Sidel's thoughts on in his recent blog post.
Email: j.t.sidel@lse.ac.uk
Dr Petra Alderman, Centre Manager
Petra holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the University of Leeds and recently completed a three-year research fellowship at the University of Birmingham's Centre for Elections, Democracy, Accountability and Representation (CEDAR).
Her research focuses on democracy, authoritarianism, and promotional politics, with a particular expertise on Thailand. She is the author of Branding Authoritarian Nations: Political Legitimation and Strategic National Myths in Military-Ruled Thailand (Routledge, 2023), a monograph that offers a novel approach to the study of nation branding in authoritarian regimes. Her other academic work has been published in leading disciplinary and area studies journals, including International Political Science Review, Geopolitics, Politics and the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. She also founded, managed, and co-hosted the popular People, Power, Politics podcast.
As Centre Manager, she oversees operations, including administration, finance, communications, events, and publications.
Learn more more about Petra's work.
Email: p.alderman@lse.ac.uk
Alyssa Padbidri, Comms and Events Assistant
Alyssa manages the Centre’s event logistics and communications. She is currently pursuing a Master's in Applied Social Data Science at LSE, with a focus on the intersection of data science and social policy.
Email: seac.admin@lse.ac.uk
The Management Committee convenes its meetings to discuss prioritised agendas and help ensure that the Centre's activities and resources are effectively managed in accordance with the Centre's objectives and the School's policies and guidelines. The Committee is also expected to provide consultation for the Centre's direction and development and make contributions to the Centre's activities.
Members
- Prof. John Sidel (Chair; Centre Director)
- Dr Petra Alderman (Centre Manager)
- Prof. Hyun Bang Shin (ex-officio; Head of the Dept. of Geography and Environment)
- Prof. Hans Steinmuller (SEAC Associate; Dept. of Anthropology)
- Dr. Sharmila Parmanand (SEAC Associate; Dept. of Gender Studies)
- Dr. Qingfei Yin (SEAC Associate; Dept. of International History)
Professor Anne Booth
Prof Anne Booth is Professor Emerita at School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She has researched on the economies of Southeast Asia in both the colonial and post-colonial eras, and has written and edited a number of books on the region as well as articles in journals.
Professor Beng Huat Chua
Prof Chua Beng Huatreceived his PhD from York University, Canada. Concurrently he is the Provost Chair Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Science, and Head of the Department of Sociology, at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is also the Research Leader of Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster at the Asia Research Institute, NUS. He is currently Chairman of the Board of Trustees at Temenggong Artists-in-Residence, a non-profit visual arts institution in Singapore.
Dr Suraya Ismail
Dr Suraya Ismail is Director of Research at Khazanah Research Institute (KRI). She is a member of the Panel of Experts, Ministry of Housing and Local Government; and council member of both National Costs of Living Council, and National Council of Digital Economy, Government of Malaysia. Before joining the Institute, she was Program Director at Think City (a city-making initiative of Khazanah Nasional Berhad), where her role involved developing urban regeneration initiatives through a public grants program in George Town UNESCO WHS, Penang. Prior to that, Suraya was the Deputy Dean of the Faculty of the Built Environment at University Malaya as well as the Head of the Department of Quantity Surveying.
Suraya was educated at the University of Reading, the University of Malaya and the Bartlett School, UCL. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge.
Collin Liu
Collin Liu FCA is a member of the Regional Management Council of Rajah & Tann Asia where he serves as Chief Operating Officer (Southeast Asia) and Chief Sustainability Officer (Singapore). Earlier in his career, Collin worked with Baker McKenzie, Allen & Gledhill LLP and PwC in Singapore and London, and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales. Collin is chair of The Singapore LSE Trust and read economics at the LSE from 1994 to 1997. He serves on the boards of The Arts House Limited, a not-for-profit institution promoting performing and literary art in Singapore and Citystate Capital Asia Pte. Ltd., a financial holding company.
Professor Jonathan Rigg (SEAC Advisory Board Chair)
Prof Jonathan Rigg is Chair in Human Geography, University of Bristol, and Professor in the Department of Geography, National University of Singapore. Prior to that, he was Head of the Geography Department at Durham University in the UK. He was also based at the School of Oriental & African Studies, London University where he was a Lecturer, British Academy Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, and PhD student.
From 2016 to 2019, he held the position of Director of the Asia Research Institute, National University Singapore.
Professor Catherine Allerton
Professor Catherine Allerton is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE, and is a specialist in the anthropology of island Southeast Asia, with research interests in children and childhoods, migration, kinship, place and landscape. She has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in a two-placed village in Flores, Indonesia and in the capital city of Sabah, East Malaysia. Her current research explores experiences of exclusion, belonging and potential statelessness amongst the children of Indonesian and Filipino refugees and migrants in Sabah, East Malaysia.
Dr Laura Antona
Dr Laura Antona is Assistant Professor in Human Geography at the LSE. She is a feminist geographer whose research is centred on labour migration, forced migrant removal, and violence in the Southeast Asian region. Laura’s work both draws upon and contributes to feminist political economy, urban geography, and critical migration studies, while centring methodological innovation.
Lei (Alice) Bian
Lei (Alice) Bian is Policy Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Her policy-relevant research expertise lies in the thematic area of climate, health and environment, with a particular focus on food security and nutrition, and healthy ageing across the life course in China and the ASEAN region. She is the PI for a British Academy ODA Challenge-Oriented research project that explores the role of mangroves in improving marine food security and nutrition in coastal marinescapes in the Philippines.
Dr Fenella Cannell
Dr Fenella Cannell is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology and is a specialist in Southeast Asian anthropology. Her research explored the ways in which people come to think about "culture" in a post-colonial society, and focused on women's lives and arranged marriage, spirit-mediumship, saint's cults and religion, and popular performances including transvestite beauty contests. She has since carried out historically-based work on the Philippines, especially on education, kinship, and gender in the American colonial period.
Dr Chris Chaplin
Dr Chris Chaplin is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow in the Religion and Global Society Research Unit at the LSE. He has spent over 14 years working on the region in both academic and other professional roles and specialises in the anthropology of maritime Southeast Asia. His research focuses on the convergence between global religious doctrines and local understandings of piety and faith, and how these influence contemporary ideas of religious belonging, solidarity, and social activism.
Professor Kent Deng
Prof. Kent Deng is Professor in Economic History in the LSE Department of Economic History. He leads the LSE postgraduate module "Economic Development of East and Southeast Asia" and his research interests and writing include the rise of the literati in the economic life of pre-modern China and the maritime economic history of Asia.
Professor Tim Forsyth
Prof Tim Forsyth is Professor of Environment and Development at LSE. He has six years’ professional experience within Southeast Asia as either a researcher or worker, and is fluent in Thai with skills in Bahasa Indonesia and Burmese. His research focuses on the politics of environmental policymaking, with a particular interest in understanding local environmental risk and livelihoods, and reflecting this knowledge in global environmental policies and assessments.
Dr Jürgen Haacke
Dr Jürgen Haacke is Associate Professor in International Relations at LSE. He teaches and researches on the international relations of Southeast Asia, especially the foreign and security policies of Southeast Asian states, the role and policies of major powers in relation to the ASEAN region, and regional multilateral cooperation. He has published particularly widely on ASEAN and Myanmar’s foreign policy.
From August 2016 until July 2018 Dr Haacke was Director of LSE SEAC.
Dr Sin Yee Koh
Dr Sin Yee Koh is Senior Assistant Professor in Asian Migration, Mobility and Diaspora at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam and also Adjunct Senior Research Fellow at the School of Arts and Social Sciences, Monash University Malaysia. Her work uses the lens of migration and mobility to understand the circulations of people, capital, and aspirations in and through cities. She has published on migration and colonial legacies, diaspora strategies, academic and teacher expatriate mobilities, migration and urban intermediaries, and lifestyle migration-led urban speculation. She was a Co-Investigator for the SEAC Research Project "".
Dr Nicholas Long
Dr Nicholas Long is Associate Professor of Anthropology at LSE. He works on the anthropology of Indonesia and the Malay World (with a particular interest in Indonesia’s Riau Archipelago), and on responses to COVID-19 in the UK and Aotearoa New Zealand. He won the 2019 Stirling Prize for Best Published Work in Psychological Anthropology for his article ‘Suggestions of Power: Searching for Efficacy in Indonesia's Hypnosis Boom’, and is currently conducting an ESRC-funded ethnographic study of Indonesia’s hypnosis and hypnotherapy circuit.
Professor Duncan McCargo
Prof Duncan McCargo works mainly on the comparative politics of Southeast Asia, especially Thailand, on which he has published widely. He hails from the North of England and did his graduate studies at SOAS, University of London. He joined NTU from the University of Copenhagen, where he was Director of the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies and Professor of Political Science from 2019 to 2023. Duncan previously held professorial appointments at the University of Leeds and Columbia University. At Leeds, he twice headed the School of Politics and International Studies, and co-supervised 30 PhD students to successful completion. At Columbia he co-founded the New York Southeast Asia Network.
His books include the award-winning Tearing Apart the Land: Islam and Legitimacy in Southern Thailand (Cornell 2008), as well as Fighting for Virtue: Politics and Justice in Thailand (Cornell 2019) and Future Forward: The Rise and Fall of a Thai Political Party (co-authored, NIAS Press 2020). Duncan has also written on politics and the media in Asia more broadly, as well as a standard introductory textbook on Japan.
Dr Sharmila Parmanand
Dr Sharmila Parmanand is an Assistant Professor and Programme Director for the MSc in Gender, Development and Globalisation degree at LSE. Her research examines the colonial histories and gendered logics that underpin development and humanitarian interventions in the global south,with a focus on the politics of knowledge production and feminist entanglements with the state on issues such as migration, gender-based violence, precarious labour, economic restructuring and social protection. She also studies connections between gender and populism and gender and political dynasties in the Philippines.
Professor James Putzel
Prof James Putzel is Professor of Development Studies in the International Development Department, LSE, where he served as head of Department 1999-2001 and Director of the Crisis States Research Centre from 2001-2011 and now directs the MSc in Development Studies. He is well-known for his research in the Philippines where he has maintained active research since 1984. His articles and books on Southeast Asia have examined agrarian reform, developmental states, democratic transitions, social capital, development aid, NGOs and civil society, nationalism, armed conflict, communist movements, the role of political Islam and the rise of rightist populist politics. Recent publications on the region include, ‘The populist right challenge to neoliberalism: social policy between a rock and a hard place’ Development and Change, February 2020, and ‘Bangsamoro Autonomy and the Political Settlement in the Philippines’. Chapter 10 in F. Lara Jr. and N. De la Rosa (eds) Conflict’s Long Game: A Decade of Violence in the Bangsamoro. Quezon City: International Alert Philippines, 2022.
Professor Kirsten Schulze
Professor Kirsten Schulze is Professor in International History at LSE. She works on communal and separatist conflicts as well as Islamism in Indonesia and the Middle East. Her publications on Indonesia include: The ‘Ethnic’ in Indonesia’s Communal Conflicts: violence in Poso, Ambon and West Kalimantan (2017), The Islamic State and Southeast Asia (2016), and Transforming the Aceh Conflict: From Military Solutions to Political Agreement (2013).
From 2014-2016 Dr Schulze was the Deputy Director of LSE SEAC, from 2012-14 she was the head of the LSE IDEAS Southeast Asia Program, and from 2004-2012 she ran the Indonesia seminar series at Chatham House.
Professor Hyun Bang Shin
Prof Hyun Bang Shin is Professor of Geography and Urban Studies and Head of the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE. Prof Shin’s research centres on the critical analysis of the political economy of urbanisation with particular attention to cities in Asian countries such as Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, South Korea and China. Prof Shin has published widely in major international journals and contributed to numerous books on the above themes. His most recent books include Exporting Urban Korea? Reconsidering the Korean Urban Development Experience (2021, Routledge); Covid-19 in Southeast Asia: An Insight into a Post-Pandemic World(LSE Press, 2022); The Political Economy of Mega Projects in Asia: Globalization and Urban Transformation (forthcoming, Routledge). He is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation. He is also a co-organiser of the Urban Salon, an interdisciplinary London forum for architecture, cities and international urbanism, and edits an LSE blog Field Research Methods Lab.
Prof. Shin was SEAC Centre Director from August 2018- July 2023.
Dr Thomas Smith
Dr Thomas Smith is Associate Professor in Environmental Geography at the LSE. Tom is a geographer and environmental scientist, specialising in interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the role of biomass burning in the Earth system. He teaches on a number of environmental courses, focussing on innovative technology-enhanced experiential learning and field-based education in geography. He holds a PhD in Physical Geography from King’s College London and has held Visiting Fellow posts at the National University of Singapore, Monash University Malaysia, University of Wollongong (Australia) and Universiti Brunei Darussalam.
Podcast: Dialogues on Southeast Asia| Introducing our SEAC Associate: Dr Thomas Smith Discussing The Environmental Challenges of Southeast Asia
Professor Hans Steinmüller
Prof Hans Steinmüller is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, LSE and a specialist in the anthropology of China. He has conducted long-term fieldwork in Hubei Province (central China) and in the Wa hills of the China-Myanmar border. Publications include the monograph Communities of Complicity (Berghahn 2013), and more recently special issues on Governing Opacity (Ethnos 2023) and Crises of Care in China Today (China Quarterly 2023). He is editor of Social Analysis and convenor of the MSc programme 'China in Comparative Perspective'.
Podcast: Dialogues on Southeast Asia| Introducing our SEAC Associate: Dr Hans Steinmüller | Discussing the Intricacies of Wa State as a Borderland between China and Myanmar
Dr Qingfei Yin
Dr Qingfei Yin is Assistant Professor of International History (China and the World) at LSE. As a historian of contemporary China and inter-Asian relations, her research focuses on China’s relations with its Asian neighbours, Asian borderlands, and the Cold War in Asia. She is particularly interested in how the global Cold War interacted with state-building in marginal societies. She is currently completing her book manuscript State Building in Cold War Asia: Comrades and Competitors on the Sino-Vietnamese Border (under contract with Cambridge University Press). Subsequent projects are on how capitalist Southeast Asian countries shaped China during the latter’s early reform era in the 1980s and the historical memory of the Sino-Vietnamese Cold War partnership in the two countries. Dr Yin is an alumna of the LSE-Peking University Double MSc in International Affairs Programme. She studied International Politics and History at Peking University for her undergraduate degrees and completed her PhD in History at George Washington University. Before returning to LSE, she was Assistant Professor of History at Virginia Military Institute. She also serves as the Book Review Editor of Journal of Military History and on the Editorial Board of Cold War History.
Dr Elisabeth Kramer (Visiting Fellow) is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at UNSW, a Scientia Fellow and an ARC DECRA Fellow (2023).
Elisabeth began her academic career researching corruption and anticorruptionism in Indonesian elections but her research interests have since broadened, sitting at the scholarly intersection between politics, policy and interest-based advocacy, with a focus on Indonesia. She has been awarded research grants from the Australian Research Council and the Department of Education and Training (Endeavour Program) to support her research. She currently holds two Australian Research Council grants focused on therapeutic opioid policy and use and the political dynamics of tobacco regulation in Indonesia.
Elisabeth's first monograph The Candidate's Dilemma: Anticorruptionism and Money Politics in Indonesian Elections (Cornell University Press, 2022) delves into the lived experiences of candidates to offer a nuanced study of how the political and personal intersect when it comes to money politics, anticorruptionism, and electoral campaigning in Indonesia.
Elisabeth has held Visiting Fellowships at Harvard University (Global Center for Tobacco Control), Chiang Mai University, and University of Indonesia.
Prior to commencing her academic career Elisabeth, worked in a variety of industries including the public service, international development, NGOs and ESL teaching. She was previously the Deputy Director at the Sydney Southeast Asia Centre (SSEAC) at the University of Sydney and remains an Honorary Associate at the School of Languages and Culture at the University of Sydney. Elisabeth is of Indonesian heritage and is proficient in Indonesian language.
Learn more about Dr Elisabeth Kramer in SEAC's Spotlight On...Series.
Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak (Visiting Professor) is Professor of International Relations at Chulalongkorn University’s faculty of political science and Senior Fellow at its Institute of Security and International Studies in Bangkok. Thitinan has held visiting positions at Johns Hopkins University, Stanford University, University of Victoria in New Zealand, and Yangon University, and currently serves on several editorial boards of academic journals, including Journal of Democracy. He has authored a host of articles, books, book chapters and over 1,000 opinion articles in mass media such as Project Syndicate, The Bangkok Post, Nikkei Asian Review, The Straits Times, South China Morning Post, International New York times, and Financial Times. As an analyst on Thailand/ASEAN-Southeast Asia, his comments and views have appeared regularly in international media, includingAljazeera, BBC, CNN, Bloomberg, CNBC, NHK, DW, among others. Prior to his academic and think-tank career, Thitinan worked for the BBC World Service and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) in London. His current work focuses on the comparative politics and geopolitics/geoeconomics of ASEAN and the Indo-Pacific in view of the US-China rivalry and competition.
In 2015, he was recognised for excellence in opinion writing by Society of Publishers in Asia (SOPA). During 2017-present, he holds the appointment as International Advisory Board Member of Asia-New Zealand Foundation (ANZF). In March 2018, he was appointed ASEAN@50 Fellow by New Zealand’s Minister of Foreign Affairs & Trade. In May 2019, he was selected as Australia-ASEAN Fellow at Sydney’s Lowy Institute. From 2021-present, he is senior advisor for geopolitics with Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES). From January 2023-present, he is appointed an independent expert of ADMM+ Cybersecurity and Information Centre of Excellence (ACICE). In January 2024, Thitinan was awarded a commendation by the Japanese government for his work on Japan-Thailand and Japan-ASEAN relations. For the past two decades, he has been a columnist with The Bangkok Post. He completed degrees at the University of California at Santa Barbara (with Distinction) and Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, with a PhD from London School of Economics which won the UK’s best dissertation prize in 2002.
Learn more about Professor Thitinan Pongsudhirak in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Prof Dan Slater (Visiting Professor) is the James Orin Murfin Professor of Political Science and Director of the Center for Emerging Democracies (@umichDemocracy) at the University of Michigan. He specializes in the politics and history of democracy and authoritarianism, especially in Southeast Asia. His books include From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia (Princeton 2022, with Joseph Wong) and Ordering Power: Contentious Politics and Authoritarian Leviathans in Southeast Asia (Cambridge 2010).
Learn more about Prof Slater in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Prof Jeehun Kim (Visiting Professor) is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Social Studies Education, and Director of the Center for Global Korean and Asian Studies, Inha University, South Korea. He is a sociologist-cum-[Southeast/East] Asianist of contemporary Korean and Asian societies and global mobilities. The span of his research interests in Asia are seen not only in his work on older adults in Singapore, but also his research on middle-aged and young adult Koreans in Singapore and other Southeast Asian countries, on pre-college and post-college student mobilities across Asia and beyond (including Los Angeles, USA), on urban neighborhood changes in post-Suharto Jakarta and globalizing Hanoi, and on changing identities of so-called ‘multicultural families’ in Korea. During his Fellowship he will be working on Pricing Flexible Citizenship, Practicing Transnational Retirement: Korean elders in Singapore, Seoul and Los Angeles.
Learn more about Prof Kim in SEAC's
Dr. Vilashini Somiah (Visiting Fellow) is a Feminist Anthropologist from Sabah, Malaysia, and a Senior Lecturer at the Gender Studies Programme, Universiti Malaya. Her research centers on the agency of Bornean women, migrants, Indigenous peoples, and sexual and gender minorities. During her time as a SEAC Visiting Fellow, she will focus on her recent project, which explores how Indigenous and migrant women in a remote mountainous district of Sabah, Malaysia, reclaim gendered spaces amid urban transformation, gentrification, and economic recovery post-COVID-19.
Dr Somiah's Visiting Fellowship is supported by the Southeast Asia Neighborhoods Network 2.0: Communities of Learning, Research and Teaching Collaborative (SEANNET Collective)
Learn more about Dr Vilashini Somiah in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Professor Deepanshu Mohan (Visiting Professor) is Professor of Economics and Dean, IDEAS, Office of Interdisciplinary Studies, O.P. Jindal Global University (JGU), New Delhi, India. He is Director, Centre for New Economics Studies, Jindal School of Liberal Arts, and a Senior Research Fellow, International Institute of Higher Education at JGU. Prof Deepanshu is a Visiting Fellow at SEAC until the end of May. His research at SEAC focuses on the post-pandemic livelihood transition of street vendors in city-markets across Cambodia's Phnom Penh area.
Learn more about Professor Deepanshu Mohan in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Benjamin Lawrence (Visiting Fellow) is a Research Fellow at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for Asian Legal Studies (CALS). Dr Lawrence was at SEAC as Visiting Fellow from 1 May to 31 July 2023. Dr Lawrence's research at SEAC focused on the Micropolitics of Constitutionalism in Cambodia.
Learn more about Dr Lawrence in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz (Visiting Fellow) is Research Fellow at Clare Hall, Supervisor in World History, and the Executive Director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation. Dr CuUnjieng Aboitiz joined SEAC from 1 February to 31 July 2023. Dr CuUnjieng Aboitiz's research at SEAC focused on Co-constitution of Filipino Elite Class and Relationships with Nature, 1870-1986.
Learn more about Dr CuUnjieng Aboitiz in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Ofita Purwani (Visiting Senior Fellow) is Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, Universitas Sebelas Maret, Indonesia. Dr Purwani was at the Centre as Visiting Senior Fellow from 1 April to 30 June 2023. Dr Purwani's research at SEAC focuses on urban development in Yogyakarta after decentralisation.
Learn more about Dr Purwani in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Kanokrat Lertchoosakul (Visiting Fellow) is assistant professor at the department of government, faculty of political science, Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Dr Lertchoosakul joins SEAC from 1 February to 30 April 2023. Dr Lertchoosakul's research at SEAC focuses on
Learn more about Dr Lertchoosakul in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Andy Scott Chang (Visiting Senior Fellow) is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Singapore Management University. Dr Chang joined SEAC from 30 January to 24 April 2023. Dr Chang's research at SEAC focused on The Making of "Foreign-Exchange Heroes": Gender, Occupation, and the Social Organization of Labour Migration in Indonesia.
Learn more about Dr Chang in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Helena Varkkey (Visiting Fellow) is Associate Professor of Environmental Politics at the Department of International and Strategic Studies, Universiti Malaya. Dr Varkkey joined SEAC from 30 January to 12 March 2023. Dr Varkkey's research at SEAC focused on .
Learn more about Dr Varkkey in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Professor Tamaki Endo (Visiting Professor) is Professor at the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Saitama University. Prof Endo was at the Centre as Visiting Senior Fellow from 1st October 2022 to 31st January 2023. Prof Endo’s research at SEAC focused on urban inequality in Thailand.
Learn more about Prof Endo in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Prof Julio Tehankee (Visiting Senior Fellow) is Professor of Political Science and International Studies at De La Salle University. Prof Teehankee joins SEAC as Visiting Senior Fellow from 19 September - 19 December 2022. During his fellowship Prof Teehankee's research will focus on Authoritarian Nostalgiaand the Marcos Restoration in the Philippines.
Learn more about Prof Teehankee in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Sulfikar Amir (Visiting Senior Fellow) is an Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society (STS) in the Sociology Programme, School of Social Sciences, Nanyang Technological University. He joined the Centre as Visiting Senior Fellow from 19 September - 19 December 2022. During his fellowship Dr Amir's research focused on Scrutinizing Nusantara: The Fallacies of Indonesia’s New Capital, and How Political Leadership Shapes Covid-19 Mitigation in Southeast Asia.
Dr Gerard McCarthy (Visiting Fellow) is Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Dr McCarthy joined SEAC as Visiting Fellow from 5 September - 2 September 2022. During his fellowship his research focused on Politics of gig-economy in Southeast Asia; and hybrid political order in Asia.
Learn more about Dr McCarthy in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Lin Hongxuan (Visiting Fellow) is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He joined the Centre as Visiting Fellow from 31st January 2022 for a year. During his fellowship his research focused on the historical production and circulation of progressive Islamic ideas across the Malay Archipelago.
Read more on Dr Lin in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Joseph Scalice (Visiting Fellow) was a Postdoctoral researcher at Nanyang Technological University. Dr Scalice was at the Centre as Visiting Fellow from 15 November 2021 - 30 April 2022. Dr Scalice's research at SEAC focused on how the Sino-Soviet split impacted critical political developments in the Southeast Asian region.
Dr Junjia Ye (Visiting Fellow) is Assistant Professor in Human Geography at Nanyang Technological University. Dr Ye was at the Centre as Visiting Fellow from 4 October 2021 - 3 January 2022. Dr Ye's research at SEAC focused on surveillance and borderings in migrant enclaves in Singapore.
Learn more about Dr Ye and her work in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Jayde Roberts (Visiting Fellow) is Senior Lecturer in the School of Built Environment at UNSW Sydney. Dr Roberts was at the Centre as Visiting Fellow from 27 September - 31 December 2021. Dr Roberts's research at SEAC focused on public space in the two largest cities of Myanmar: Yangon and Mandalay.
Dr Emma Colven (Visiting Fellow) is Assistant Professor of Global Environment at the University of Oklahoma. Dr Colven was at the Centre as Visiting Fellow from 27 September - 17 December 2021. Dr Colven's research at SEAC focused on flooding, water crises and the real estate industry in Jakarta.
Learn more about Dr Colven and her work in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Shanthi Thambiah (Visiting Senior Fellow) is Associate Professor in the Gender Studies Program, at the University of Malaya. Dr Thambiah was at the Centre as Visiting Senior Fellow from 15 July - 15 October 2021. Dr Thambiah's research at SEAC focused on the emotional interconnectedness and governance of Indonesian and Malaysian Migrant Domestic Workers.
Learn more about Dr Thambiah and her work in SEAC's Spotlight On... Series
Dr Joanne Lim (Visiting Senior Fellow) is Associate Professor in Communications, Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham in Malaysia. She is also Associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences. Dr Lim was at the Centre as Visiting Senior Fellow from 4th May 2021 to 2nd July 2021. Dr Lim’s research at SEAC focused on digital interventions in Southeast Asia cities.
Dr Merlyna Lim (Visiting Senior Fellow) is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Digital Media and Global Network Society at Carleton University Canada. An ALiGN Media Lab founder/director, Dr Lim’s research interests revolve around the mutual shaping of technology and society, and political culture of technology, especially digital media and information technology, in relation to issues of justice, democracy and civic/participatory engagement. Dr Lim is an interdisciplinary scholar who has published extensively in various disciplines, including communication and media studies, religious studies, journalism, urban studies/sociology, geography, anthropology, Asian studies, Middle East studies, information and library science, computer science and information systems.
Do Young Oh (Visiting Fellow) is a Researcher at LSE Cities. He recently completed his PhD in Regional and Urban Planning at the Department of Geography and Environment at the LSE with his thesis focusing on a comparative analysis of East Asian urbanisation processes. His research at LSE research involves an investigation into the university-city relationship in Singapore and Vietnam in a (post-)colonial context.
Daniel Peterson (Visiting Research Student) is currently completing his PhD at the Institute for Religion, Politics and Society at Australian Catholic University. Daniel’s thesis investigates whether or not Indonesia's broader human rights legal framework can withstand the challenges presented by the rise of political Islam in the archipelago. Daniel also works as a research assistant at the Institute, where he is a principal contributor to both Euro-Islam and SHARIAsource
Lukas Schlogl (Visiting Fellow) is a Research Associate with the ESRC Global Poverty & Inequality Dynamics Research Network at the Department of International Development, King’s College London. His current work focuses on structural change, digital transformation, and political behavior in Indonesia. At SEAC, Lukas reviewed the extant literature about potential economic impacts of labour-displacing technological change on Southeast Asian economies.
Joel Selway (Visiting Senior Fellow) is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Brigham Young University. His research interests focus on ethnically-divided societies, and especially on how to design democratic institutions to prevent conflict. During his time with SEAC, Dr Selway examined the question of whether Thailand’s nation-building project will endure beyond the death of its beloved monarch, the late King Bhumibol Adulyadej.
Tim Andrews (Visiting Senior Fellow) is an Associate Professor at Webster University (Thailand) and a previous academic at Thammasat University based in Bangkok. His research at LSE SEAC focused on an investigation into the working lives of base-of-organizational-pyramid employees in emerging Southeast Asia.
Chris Chaplin (Visiting Fellow) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). His research at LSE SEAC examined the relationships between conservative Islamic activism and modern understandings of citizenship and class in post-Suharto Indonesia.
Trude Jacobsen (Visiting Senior Fellow) is an Associate Professor of Southeast Asian history at Northern Illinois University, where she has served as Assistant Director in the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. Her research at LSE SEAC was on cultural history of madness, psychiatry, and mental health in mainland Southeast Asia from c. 1800 to 1950.
Stephen James (Visiting Research Student) has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology and an MA in Southeast Asian Studies. His research at LSE SEAC involved carrying out a multi-sited, longitudinal study of Vietnamese migration, focusing on forced migration through the Vietnam-Hong Kong-London trajectory.
Joern Dosch (Visiting Professor) is Professor of International Politics and Development Cooperation at the University of Rostock, Germany. His research at LSE SEAC involved a comparative study of foreign policies of the Southeast Asian States as well as Europe-Asia relations.
Ken Teoh (Visiting Research Student) worked as Research Assistant both at the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Economics and at the Wharton School’s Management Department. His key interests are in econometrics, statistical modelling, and consumer and macroeconomic data analysis.
Lucy Zhu (Visiting Research Student) was working as a research assistant for Professor Danny Quah through the Madeleine Korbel Albright Institute of Global Affairs, of which she was a 2015 Fellow. She studied the dynamic Eastern-Western economic relationship from an international relations perspective.
In 2019, The Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre launched the , with the long-term goal of building a global network of scholars to collaborate, create, engage and ultimately to advance and raise the profile of research and debate on Southeast Asia.