Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellows
PAST FELLOWS
2023/2024
Soksamphoas Im is an Associate Director with the Asian Studies Center (ASN) at Michigan State University and an affiliated scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Dr Im served her fellowship at FASS from 8 April to 31 May 2024. She is working on ‘Authoritarian Resiliency: Cambodia’s Politics of Social Protection Policy’, a research project and future book that examines Cambodia’s National Social Protection Policy Framework 2016-2025’s IDPoor Program. The project builds on her dissertation research on the politics of the Cambodia National Ageing Policy 2017-2023 and on scholarship by Huang (2014) on social protection under authoritarianism in the People’s Republic of China. Her research has been published in Ageing and Social Policy, Journal of Industrial Relations, Asian Politics & Policy, Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights, Asian Studies Review, and is forthcoming in Routledge Handbook of Autocratization in Southeast Asia, Politics & Policy, Southeast Asian Studies, Pacific Affairs, and Social Policy & Administration.
Read an interview with Dr Im on her current research.
Gerhard Hoffstaedter is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Science at the University of Queensland. He has a BA in Social Anthropology and Politics/International Relations and an MA in Social Anthropology from the University of Kent at Canterbury and was awarded a PhD in anthropology and sociology from La Trobe University. From 2014-2017 he was an Australian Research Council DECRA research fellow.
He conducts research in development studies, on refugee and immigration policy and spiritual and existential security as well as religion and the state. He is a regular commentator in newspapers, radio and online media on topics of his research.
His first book entitled Modern Muslim Identities: Negotiating Religion and Ethnicity in Malaysia is published by NIAS Press. He is co-editor of a volume on human security and Australian foreign policy published by Allen and Unwin as well as one on Urban refugees: Challenges in Protection, Services and Policy, published by Routledge.
Read an interview with A/P Hoffstaedter on his current research.
2022/2023
Jacques Bertrand is Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto, as well as director of the Collaborative Master’s Specialization in Contemporary East and Southeast Asian Studies at the Asian Institute within the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Affairs. He was the founding director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the Asian Institute. He is also the co-founder of the Postcor Lab at the University of Toronto, a research hub for the study of civil wars and war-to-peace transitions.
Professor Bertrand has worked for many years on issues of ethnic conflict, nationalism, and secessionism in Southeast Asia. His research has been funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the United States Institute of Peace, as well as the International Development Research Centre. His most recent book, Winning by Process: The State and Neutralization of Ethnic Minorities in Myanmar, was published in July 2022 by Cornell University Press. Professor Bertrand is also the author of Democracy and Nationalist Struggles in Southeast Asia: From Secessionist Mobilization to Conflict Resolution (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Political Change in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2013), and Nationalism and Ethnic Conflict in Indonesia (Cambridge, 2004).
He is also the author of numerous articles and book chapters and co-editor of two volumes: Multination States in Asia: Accommodation or Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2010) and Democratization and Ethnic Minorities: Conflict or Compromise? (Routledge, 2014).
Professor Bertrand is leading a new research team on a project entitled “Return to Civil War: Insurgent Groups and the Decision to Abandon Peace.” Funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the United States Institute of Peace, this project aims at understanding why rebel groups return to war after periods of relative peace. While the focus of civil war recurrence has often been on failures of peace agreements, this project will analyze rebel groups themselves and their strategic decisions to return to war or invest in peace. More specifically, it aims at better understanding how different legacies of war lead to varying trajectories in the post-war context. The bulk of the research involves a qualitative analysis of several cases in Southeast Asia. Bertrand builds on his vast experience of studying ethnic armed groups in Myanmar to lead new fieldwork focused on understanding variance among these groups.
Read an interview with Prof Bertrand on his current research.
Reza Idria is an Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology at the Universitas Islam Negeri (UIN) Ar-Raniry (Ar-Raniry State Islamic University) in Banda Aceh, Indonesia. He holds an MA and Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Harvard University as well as an MA in Islamic Studies from Leiden University, The Netherlands. Born and raised in Aceh, the only province adopting Sharia Law in Indonesia, Dr Idria’s research interests are at the intersection of legal anthropology and Islamic law.
During his LKC NUS-Stanford fellowship, he will turn his doctoral dissertation, “Tales of the Unexpected: Contesting Syari’ah Law in Aceh, Indonesia,” into a book manuscript. This work is an anthropological study that examines a wide range of social and political responses that have emerged with the state implementation of Sharia (Islamic law). The empirical data for this research project has been gathered in Aceh, the only Indonesian province that has adopted Sharia. Dr Idria is also embarking on a new research project that focuses on the legal and socio-economic consequences of the local regulation on Islamic banking.
Dr Idria is a reviewer for the journals American Ethnologist, Asian Medicine, and Asia Pacific Studies. He publishes in national and international journals, edits and writes book chapters in scholarly publications, gives talks, and facilitates training on issues of his interests and expertise. Besides teaching and researching, Dr Idria is renowned for his contributions as a human rights defender and a facilitator of several cultural communities and critical study groups in Aceh. He is the Chair of the Aceh Association of Oral Tradition, and a member of the Indonesian Young Academy of Science (ALMI).
Read an interview with Dr Idria on his research.
2020/2021
Kate A Imy
Assistant Professor, History
University of North Texas
Kate Imy is an Assistant Professor of History at the University of North Texas. Her first book, Faithful Fighters: Identity and Power in the British Indian Army (Stanford, 2019) examines anti-colonialism, faith, and the body in the colonial Indian Army. It won the North American Conference of British Studies’ Stansky Prize, the American Historical Association’s Pacific Coast Branch Book Award, and was an honorable mention for the American Political Science Association’s International Security Branch award. Her work also has appeared in Gender & History, the Journal of British Studies, and Twentieth Century British History.
Dr. Imy’s second book project explores how ideas about race and gender shaped the experience of war in colonial Singapore and Malaya from the First World War to the Malayan Emergency. In addition to being a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia, she has received support on this project from the AHA’S Bernadotte E. Schmitt Grant. An article on identity and internment in Japanese-occupied Singapore is forthcoming in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. She is a two-time recipient of the Critical Language Scholarship program (Hindi and Urdu) and held previous fellowships in India (Fulbright) and the United Kingdom (Institute of Historical Research).
Enze Han
Associate Professor, Department of Politics and Public Administration
University of Hong Kong
Enze Han is an Associate Professor at the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). His research interests include ethnic politics in China, China's relations with Southeast Asia, and the politics of state formation in the borderland area between China, Myanmar and Thailand. He received a Ph.D in Political Science from the George Washington University in the United States in 2010. Afterwards, he undertook a postdoctoral research fellowship in the China and the World Program at Princeton University.
His research has been supported by the Leverhulme Research Fellowship, and British Council/Newton Fund. During 2015-2016, he was a member at the School of Social Science, The Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. In 2017, Enze was awarded an East Asia Institute Fellowship in Seoul, South Korea. Prior to Hong Kong, he was a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Politics and International Studies at SOAS, University of London, where he remains as a research associate. In 2021, Enze was awarded the Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at Stanford University and the National University of Singapore.
2018/2019
Paul Schuler
Assistant Professor, Political Science
University of Arizona
Paul Schuler is the 2018-2019 Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at Stanford University and the National University of Singapore. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, where he studies Southeast Asian politics, Vietnamese politics, and authoritarian institutions. He guest-lectures and publishes widely. His latest article is "Position Taking or Position Ducking? A Theory of Public Debate in Single-party Legislatures," Comparative Political Studies (March 2018). Earlier scholarship has appeared in the American Political Review and Comparative Politics, among other outlets. He is fluent in Vietnamese and has served as a UNDP consultant in Vietnam. His political science doctorate was earned with distinction at the University of California, San Diego.
Sophie Lemiere
Political Anthropologist, Ash Center for Democracy
Democracy in Hard Places, Harvard Kennedy School
Sophie Lemiere is the 2018-2019 Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at Stanford University and the National University of Singapore. Her research looks at the nexus between religion, politics and criminality in a comparative perspective, focusing on the deep structure of political systems.
She received her PhD from Sciences-Po, France, her thesis was the first study on the political role of gangs through umbrella NGOs in Malaysia. Her Masters research on the apostasy controversies and Islamic civil society was awarded the second prize for International Young Scholar from the ISIM, Leiden in 2007. She has held research positions at RSIS-NTU in 2011 then at ARI in 2012 and has been visiting fellow at the University of Sydney, Cornell, UC Berkeley and Columbia. Sophie believes it is essential for academics to disseminate their research to a wide audience, and primarily in the countries they study. With this idea in mind, she has oriented her efforts towards the publication of original scholarship addressing both a general and academic audience within and outside of Malaysia. With this in mind, Sophie Lemière is the editor of a series “Malaysian Politics and People”. The first volume Misplaced Democracy was released in 2014, the second volume Illusions of democracy was published in 2017 and will be re-published in 2018 by Amsterdam University Press; the third volume is expected for 2019. Her monograph “Gangsters and Masters: Complicit Militancy and Authoritarian Politics” will be published also 2019. Sophie currently works on a political biography of Mahathir campaign “The Last Game: Malaysian Politics in the Eye of Mahathir”.
She has made considerable efforts to give visibility to Malaysian Studies by publishing in both international academic and non-academic outlets, Sophie has a blog on Mediapart and regularly contributes to publications such as New Mandala, The Conversation, Le Monde, Libération.
Chin-hao Huang
Assistant Professor, Political Science
Yale-NUS College
Chin-Hao Huang is assistant professor of political science at Yale-NUS College. He specializes in international politics, with a focus on China and Asia. He is the recipient of the Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford University Fellowship on Contemporary Southeast Asia (2017-2018), and the American Political Science Association (APSA) Foreign Policy Section Best Paper Award (2014) for his research on China's compliance behavior in multilateral security institutions. His research has been published in The China Quarterly, The China Journal, and International Peacekeeping, and in edited volumes through Oxford University Press and Routledge, among others. His book manuscript under preparation for review explains how and why Chinese foreign policy decision-makers exercise restraint and the conditions under which they are more or less likely to take on self-constraining commitments. He received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Southern California and B.S. with honors from Georgetown University.
2017/2018
Antje Missbach
Senior Research Fellow, School of Social Sciences
Monash University
Antje Missbach is the 2017-18 Lee Kong Chian Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia at Stanford University and the National University of Singapore. She works as Senior Research Fellow at the School of Social Sciences at Monash University. Her research interests include the socio-legal dimensions of forced migration in Southeast Asia, border regimes, asylum policies and refugee protection in the Asia-Pacific, as well as diaspora politics and long-distance nationalism. She is the author of Troubled Transit: Asylum seekers stuck in Indonesia (ISEAS, 2015) and Politics and Conflict in Indonesia: The Role of the Acehnese Diaspora (Routledge, 2011).
2016/2017
Gerald Sim
Associate Professor, Florida Atlantic University
United States of America
Gerald Sim arrives after spending the fall quarter at Stanford University as Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Distinguished Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia. He will spend his time at NUS completing his manuscript tentatively titled, Besides Hybridity: Postcolonial Poetics of Southeast Asian Cinema, contracted with Indiana University Press. The book uses the region’s unique colonial history to conceive of postcolonial aesthetics beyond the usual tropes of hybridity and syncretism, while attending to an understudied but thriving segment of world cinema. Individual chapters explore Singapore’s spatial imagination, Malaysian soundscapes, and Indonesian cinema’s relationship to genre.
Sim was a Visiting Senior Research Fellow at the Asia Research Institute in 2013 and 2016. He is the author of The Subject of Film and Race: Retheorizing Politics, Ideology, and Cinema (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), a Neo-Marxian evaluation of film studies’ engagements with race. His other writing on diverse topics that include Japanese cinema, film music theory, Edward Said, digital cinematography, and CNBC personality Jim Cramer, has been published in Asian Cinema, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Discourse, Projections, and Rethinking Marxism.
He holds a Ph.D. in Film Studies from the University of Iowa, and a BS in Biology from Duke.
Professor David Timberman
Visiting Professor, De La Salle University
Manila, Philippines
David Timberman is a political analyst and development practitioner with 30 years of experience analyzing and addressing political and governance challenges, principally in Southeast and South Asia. Currently he is the NUS-Stanford University Lee Kong Chian Fellow on Contemporary Southeast Asia, which is enabling him to work on two books on the Philippines: an edited volume exploring the politics and consequences of recent budget reforms and a volume of essays on key aspects of the Philippines’ political economy. During 2015-2016 he was a Visiting Professor of Political Science at De La Salle University in Manila, where he taught courses on Southeast Asian politics and policy reform in the Philippines. He has lived and worked in the Philippines, Indonesia and Singapore, including experiencing first-hand the democratic transitions in the Philippines (1986-1988) and Indonesia (1998-2001). He has written extensively on political and governance issues in the Philippines and has edited or co-edited multi-author volumes on the Philippines, Cambodia and economic policy reform in Southeast Asia. He holds a MA in International Affairs from Columbia University and a BA in political science (with honors) and history from Tufts University.
2015/2016
Anne BOOTH
Emeritus Professor, School of Oriental and African Studies Department of Economics
Project: “Changing Living Standards in Southeast Asia in the 20th Century”
Anne BOOTH studied Economics at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand and the Australian National University in Canberra, and worked in universities in Singapore, Indonesia and Australia before joining the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) at the University of London (UOL) in 1991. Her interests are mainly in the modern economic history of Southeast Asia, with a particular focus on the legacies of the various colonial powers in the region, and their impact on post-colonial developments. Her recent work includes a comparative study of European and Japanese colonial legacies in Asia, and a study of trade and investment links between China and Southeast Asia. She is currently Emeritus Professor of Economics at SOAS, UOL.
Anne was hosted by the Research Division, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences from 4 July to 17 August 2016.
Pavin CHACHAVALPONGPUN
Associate Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University
2014/2015
Lee Jones
School of Politics and International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London
Project: "Securitisation and the Governance of Non-Traditional Security"
Dr. Lee Jones is Senior Lecturer in International Politics at Queen Mary, University of London and Research Associate at the Asia Research Centre, Murdoch University, Perth, Australia. Lee’s research concerns the interaction between social conflict, state transformation and international relations, with a heavy focus on Southeast Asia. He is author of ASEAN, Sovereignty and Intervention in Southeast Asia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), Societies Under Siege: Exploring How International Economic Sanctions (Do Not) Work (Oxford University Press, 2015) and, with Shahar Hameiri, Governing Borderless Threats: Non-Traditional Security and the Politics of State Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2015). He has advised many governmental and non-governmental agencies in Europe and Asia and regularly appears in the British and international media. Lee’s website is www.leejones.tk and he tweets @DrLeeJones.
His research project as a Lee Kong Chian Fellow, “Securitisation and the Governance of Non-Traditional Security”, seeks to explain how new transboundary security threats such as pandemic disease, transboundary pollution, transnational crime and terrorism are managed in the Southeast Asian region.
2012/2013
Tim Forsyth
Department of International Development, London School of Economics and Political Science
Project: "Environmentalism at the cutting edge: How do environmental norms and expertise stabilize in Southeast Asia?"
Janet Hoskins
Department of Anthropology, University of Southern California
Project: "The Divine Eye and the Diaspora: Vietnamese Caodaism in Global Perspective"
2011/2012
Graham Brown
Centre for Development Studies, University of Bath
Project: "Postcards from Eurabia: Global interconnectedness and the dynamic culturalization of domestic conflict in Southeast Asia"
James Ockey
School of Social and Political Sciences, Canterbury University
Project: "Trakun Kanmuang: Family Politics in Thailand"
2010/2011
Huang Jianli
Department of History, National University of Singapore
Project: "Mapping an ‘Ungrounded Empire’ of the Chinese Diaspora: Lee Kong Chian and his Economic Enterprises in Postwar Southeast Asia"
2009/2010
Jürgen Rüland
Department of Political Science, University of Freiburg
Project: "Constructing Regionalism Domestically: Local Actors and Foreign Policymaking in Indonesia"
2008/2009
Robert Hefner
Department of Anthropology, Boston University
Project: "Rethinking Islam and Democracy: Prospects for a Pluralist Muslim Politics in Southeast Asia and Beyond"
Angie Ngọc Trần
Division of Social, Behavioral and Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay
Project: Labor-capital relations in Vietnam
Mark Thompson
Institut für Politische Wissenschaft, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Project: Late Democratization in Pacific Asia