New Books in Southeast Asian Studies Podcast
1) Vincent Pak, "Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
Queer Correctives: Discursive Neo-homophobia, Sexuality and Christianity in Singapore (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025) explores Christian discourses of sex and sexuality in Singapore to argue that metanoia...Show More
2) Kathryn Dyt, "The Nature of Kingship: The Weather-World in Nineteenth-Century Vietnam" (U Hawaii Press, 2025)
When we think about the way that Southeast Asian rulers governed their kingdoms, we usually think of the relationship between the rulers and the people. But as Katheryn Dyt shows in her new book, The ...Show More
3) Timothy Williams, "Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape" (Bristol UP, 2025)
Memory Politics After Mass Violence: Attributing Roles in the Memoryscape (Bristol UP, 2025) explores how political actors draw on memories of violent pasts to generate political power and legitimacy...Show More
4) Localisation of Islamic Arts in Malaysia
The Malay world boasts a wealth of diverse cultures. The arrival of Islam in the Malay world during the 12th to 13th centuries permanently transformed the aesthetic landscape, and even European coloni...Show More
5) Ruth E. Toulson, "Necropolitics of the Ordinary: Death and Grieving in Contemporary Singapore" (U Washington Press, 2024)
Can a state make its people forget the dead? Cemeteries have become sites of acute political contestation in the city-state of Singapore. Confronted with high population density and rapid economic gro...Show More
6) Sam Dalrymple, "Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia" (William Collins, 2025)
Partition—the rapid, uncoordinated, and bloody split between India and Pakistan after the Second World War—remains the central event of South Asian history. But 1947 wasn’t the only partition, accordi...Show More
7) Matthew Bowser, "Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma" (Manchester UP, 2025)
In Containing Decolonization: British Imperialism and the Politics of Race in Late Colonial Burma (Manchester University Press, 2025), historian Matthew Bowser examines British imperialism in late col...Show More
8) Islam, Society, and Politics in Indonesia: An Interview with Robert Hefner
Today’s episode focuses on the intersection of Islam, society, and politics in Indonesia, the world’s single-largest majority Muslim country and the world’s third biggest democracy. Indonesian Islam i...Show More
9) Timothy Barnard, "Imperial Creatures: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942" (NUS Press, 2019)
In Imperial Creature: Humans and Other Animals in Colonial Singapore, 1819-1942 (National University of Singapore Press, 2019), Timothy Barnard explores the more-than-human entanglements between empir...Show More
10) Robert Cribb et al., "Detention Camps in Asia: The Conditions of Confinement in Modern Asian History" (Brill, 2022)
Why have Asian states - colonial and independent - imprisoned people on a massive scale in detention camps? How have detainees experienced the long months and years of captivity? And what does the c...Show More