Board of Trustees
Maitrii Aung-Thwin
MAITRII AUNG-THWIN is an Associate Professor of Myanmar/Southeast Asian history and Convener of the Comparative Asian Studies PhD Program at the National University of Singapore (NUS). He is the Deputy Director of the Asia Research Institute of NUS. His current research is concerned with nation-building, identity, public history, infrastructure, and Buddhist networks in South and Southeast Asia. Dr. Aung-Thwin served on the Association of Asian Studies Board of Directors (USA) and he is currently a trustee of the Burma Studies Foundation (USA), and editor of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.
Abdul Wahid
ABDUL WAHID is a Lecturer at the Department of History, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He earned his Bachelor and Master degrees from the same university in 2000 and 2006, respectively. He obtained his M.Phil. from Leiden University in 2009, and his PhD from Utrecht University in 2013. From October to December 2013 he worked as a research fellow at the KITLV Leiden on a project about Bersiap and violence during Indonesia’s revolutionary period, 1945-1949. He joined the 3rd SEASREP traveling classroom in the Philippines in 2001 and the advanced seminar on Southeast Asian studies in Ayutthaya, Thailand in 2003.
Maria Serena Diokno
MARIA SERENA I. DIOKNO is a co-founder of SEASREP along with Charnvit Kasetsiri, Taufik Abdullah, and the late Shaharil Talib. She has overseen the development and growth of SEASREP since its inception. She is now a Professor Emeritus of History from the University of the Philippines, where she also served as an academic administrator. She chaired the National Historical Commission of the Philippines from 2011 until she resigned in 2016. Her publications include articles on the history of imperialism in Southeast Asia, perspectives of Southeast Asian studies in the region, and memory, power, and the construction of history.
Muhammad Arafat Bin Mohamad
MUHAMMAD ARAFAT BIN MOHAMAD is a social anthropologist who became interested in the study of social life through his involvement in community work in southern Thailand. In 2013, he obtained a doctoral degree in Social Anthropology at Harvard University; his dissertation examined the notion of belonging of the Patanian diaspora, which is largely based in Mecca (Saudi Arabia), but is also found in southern Thailand, Bangkok, and Kuala Lumpur. After teaching at the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies for several years, Arafat assumed a post at the University of Brunei in 2020.
Vatthana Pholsena
VATTHANA PHOLSENA graduated from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques (Institute of Political Studies, also known as ‘Sciences Po’) in Grenoble, France in 1997, before moving to the U.K. to pursue her Ph.D. at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hull. She first came to Singapore in 2002 on a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute. Subsequently, she worked as a Research Fellow in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS; National Centre for Scientific Research) for over a decade, based at the Institut d’Asie Orientale (Institute of East Asian Studies) in Lyon and at the Centre Asie du Sud-Est (Southeast Asia Centre) in Paris.
Mala Rajo Sathian
MALA RAJO SATHIAN is a Senior Lecturer at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies and the founding coordinator of the Thai studies program, both at Universiti Malaya. She previously held visiting research affiliations at Prince of Songkla University, Pattani campus, Thailand, and as a Fulbright Scholar at the Department of Anthropology, Harvard University. Her areas of research include Thailand, south Thailand and north Malaysia, relating to ethnicity and marginalization, diasporas, conflict, governance and histories of nation building. Her publications include: Siamese in Malaysia: Beyond sixty years of heritage (2018) and articles and chapters on ethnic minorities and methodology in area studies published in The Public Historian, Asian Studies Review, Jati: Journal of Southeast Asian Studies and Suvannabhumi: Multi-disciplinary Journal of Southeast Asian Studies.
