Matthew Reeder

Profile: https://discovery.nus.edu.sg/16197-matthew-reeder

Matthew Reeder is a social and cultural historian of Southeast Asia and its global interconnections. With a focus on Thailand and its Mainland neighbors, he is interested in how identity is shaped from above and below, and in the many ways that marginalized peoples make history.

His book manuscript, “Telling Apart: The Politics of Ethnic Claims in Early Modern Siam,” demonstrates that ethnic labels were increasingly mobilized for political purposes, and “peoples” increasingly understood as abstract social concepts, well before Siam’s “modern” turn in the late-nineteenth century.

Before coming to the Department of History, Reeder was a postdoctoral fellow at the Asia Research Institute and an assistant professor at Yale-NUS College. He received his doctorate from Cornell University, where his dissertation earned the Messenger Chalmers and Lauriston Sharp prizes.

His research has been supported by the Ministry of Education (Singapore), the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Council of American Overseas Research Centers, the American Historical Association, the Center for Khmer Studies, and the École française d’Extrême-Orient.

TEACHING AREAS:

• Southeast Asia
• Early Modern World History
• Identity and Ethnicity
• Thailand
• Sino-Southeast Asian Borderlands

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS:

• “Crafting a Categorical Ayutthaya: Ethnic Labeling, Administrative Reforms, and Social Organization in an Early Modern Entrepôt.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 65 (2022): 126-163.
• “The Roots of Comparative Alterity in Siam: Depicting, Describing, and Defining the Peoples of the World, 1830s-1850s.” Modern Asian Studies 55, no. 4 (2021): 1065-1111.
• “Royal Brother, Ethnic Other: Politicizing Ethnonyms in the Chronicle Compositions of Early Bangkok.” Rian Thai: International Journal of Thai Studies 10, no. 2 (2017): 65-99.
• Translation of “A Conversation with Robbers,” by Prince Damrong Rajanubhab. Journal of the Siam Society 101 (2013): 201-234. (With Chalermchai Wongrak.)