CSEAS events are cancelled for the rest of the spring semester. The UC Berkeley-UCLA conference on Ethnic and Community Identity in Southeast Asia scheduled to be held at UCLA in late April is postponed to the fall. The CSEAS Twitter feed, @CSEASUCB, continues to post links and news about current events in Southeast Asia, including country responses in the region to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Several book events were scheduled in the Bay Area in early April featuring the Vietnamese writer Nguyen Que Mai Phan. These events, scheduled to be held at Book Passage, City Lights and the Oakland Asian Cultural Center, have all been postponed.

The Institute of East Asian Studies has extended its deadline for its fellowship program for UC Berkeley graduate students in East Asian and Southeast Asian Studies to April 15, 2020. See the IEAS webpage for application details.

The Yale Indonesia Forum conference scheduled to be held this April in New Haven has been postponed to the fall.

Many publishers who planned to attend the now-cancelled Association of Asian Studies annual meeting in Boston this weekend are offering discounts of up to 40% on Asian Studies titles. See the AAS website for the list of publishers, including Cornell, Duke, Hawaii and Washington, which all have deep catalogs of Southeast Asia-related titles.

The Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI) at the University of Wisconsin-Madison takes place from June 15 to August 7. SEASSI announced today that it will only be offering synchronous distance language teaching, and no face-to-face instruction, this summer due to Covid-19. SEASSI will also be prioritizing instruction of intermediate and advanced level languages, and does not expect to offer any introductory level language instruction. For students (and faculty) who might be interested in attending SEASSI virtually this summer, applications can be submitted at the SEASSI website. [UC Berkeley students can also contact CSEAS ( cseas@berkeley.edu) if they prefer to initially express an informal interest in attending SEASSI without a firm commitment to apply.] Note: SEASSI is currently assessing demand for particular languages and levels, so there is no final announcement yet of which languages and language levels will be offered.

The Mountains Sing (Algonquin Books, 2020) by Que Mai Phan Nguyen

This new novel traces the story of a Vietnamese family across many decades of war. A mother must leave her farm with her children in northern Vietnam during the land reform movement. Years later other members of the family join the conflict along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai is one of Vietnam’s most celebrated poets. She currently lives in Jakarta. This is the first novel of hers to be published in English. 

August 26-27, 2020

Conference

Sending State Regimes and International Skilled Migration: Asian Perspectives in the Age of Global Migration

Asia Research Institute

National University of Singapore

This workshop builds on a growing body of literature that refocuses attention on sending state migration regimes. In particular, the organizers seek papers that examine the state policies, strategies, and structures that produce and facilitate labor migration. Deadline: March 31, 2020. See the ARI website for details.

September 15-17, 2020

Workshop

Bodies of Occupation

University of Nottingham Malaysia

Selangor, Malaysia

 

This workshop is organised by the Cultures of Occupation in Twentieth Century Asia (COTCA) Project to explore the ways in which the body mediates between different levels, agents, forms, spaces and media of occupation. 'Occupation' is defined to include 'high intensity' forms (e.g., imperialism, settler colonialism, military operations, political repression, extractivism, neoliberal use of bodies as productive/reproductive machines) and 'low intensity' forms (e.g., transitional justice initiatives, 'soft power', economic investments, mass tourism). Deadline: April 15, 2020. See the H-Net announcement for details.