About the Southeast Asia Initiative

Established in 2021 within the Harvard Asia Center, the Southeast Asia Initiative (SEAI) builds on efforts that began in 2008 with the formation of the Committee on Southeast Asia Studies to coordinate the Asia Center's engagement with and study of the region. The SEAI's broader mission is to support scholarship at all levels, foster collaboration with academics and practitioners, and strengthen the University’s institutional capacity in the field. Its core pillars are support for language instruction and content courses, student and faculty research, and public programming that reaches not only the Harvard community but also a global audience through hybrid and virtual events.

Country Programs

Though the SEAI approaches its mission with a comprehensive view of the region, it intentionally leverages country-specific expertise and resources by incubating country programs that work both independently and in coordination with each other and the SEAI broadly. Established in 2013, the Thai Studies Program was the first such program. In Fall 2026 the Vietnamese Studies Program will be formally announced. Faculty expertise and student engagement exist for future programs on Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia, with additional programs possible. The SEAI will remain committed to providing resources for scholars of less-resourced countries to ensure that scholarship supported by the SEAI gives a full picture of the range of experiences that the region has to offer.

The Thai Studies Program has established a professorship in Thai Studies, as well as the Surin Pitsuwan Lecture in Thai Politics and Society and an annual lecture series named for the late Professor Stanley Tambiah. The Tambiah Lectures bring representatives of academia, business, government, and other professions to Harvard to give public presentations.

The Vietnam Studies Program views the country as a strategic lens on 21st-century global challenges and will focus on six pillars: language and cultural competency, interdisciplinary research clusters, teaching and curriculum, graduate fellowships and student support, international partnerships and exchanges, and public engagement and thought leadership. 

Support for Teaching 

Language competence is the foundation for international scholarship and the SEAI has directly invested in upgrading the tutorial-based model previously employed for Southeast Asian languages—excluding Vietnamese, which has long been taught in the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations. Filipino and Indonesian are now taught by full-time preceptors, and a search for a Thai preceptor is expected within the year. Southeast Asia (SEA) language preceptors are provided by the SEAI with funds to support their professional development and course-related extracurricular programming, including cultural events, film screenings, and language tables.

The SEAI is funding a multi-year curricular development project in Vietnamese, led by Senior Preceptor Hoa Le. The aim of this project is to create a set of teaching materials that incorporate advances in pedagogy and technology. With generous donor support, the Filipino preceptorship has been endowed, ensuring Filipino will be taught at Harvard in perpetuity. Among the SEAI’s ongoing goals is securing endowments for all Southeast Asian languages taught at the university. At a time when many language programs rely on uncertain federal funding, Harvard’s sustained commitment to Southeast Asian language instruction is essential to building a world-class SEA program.

By expanding language offerings and related programming, the SEAI aims to showcase the region as a rich laboratory for interdisciplinary academic inquiry and build demand for area studies courses across the university. Current offerings include courses on modern Vietnamese history, modern Southeast Asian history, contemporary Southeast Asia through literature and film, and Islam in Southeast Asia. 

In order to tap into existing expertise at Harvard, the SEAI is offering course development grants for faculty to incorporate SEA into existing courses or develop new courses focused on the region. A key strategic priority for SEAI is the addition of faculty positions in Southeast Asian studies across schools.

Support for Faculty and Public Programming

The members of the Southeast Asia Faculty Working Group and their colleagues across Harvard’s schools set the intellectual agenda for the SEAI, both through their individual work and their collective strategic coordination. The SEAI offers its support in both areas, via individual and collaborative faculty research grants, course support, faculty-invited lecturers, and administrative support for faculty priorities.

Connecting students and faculty, as well as the broader Harvard and local communities, the public programming organized or supported by the SEAI is the most visible area of its activities.

The 2025-26 Islam in Southeast Asia Seminar Series featured talks on Muslim women, health, and modernity in Southeast Asia, and global history through the lens of Sufi scholarship. The Thai Studies Program hosted several events, including the Surin Pitsuwan Lecture in Thai Politics and Society, delivered by Paul Chambers of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) - Yusof Ishak Institute and the University of Oklahoma, who spoke on Thailand’s military and its threat to democratization. 

The Southeast Asia Seminar Series covered topics such as botany across Southeast Asia, disability rights in post-coup Myanmar, Singapore and Pax American in Southeast Asia, Thai economic development, and the origins of Vietnamese language.

In Fall 2025, the SEAI Artists in Residence Program welcomed Abigail G. Billones and Eric V. Dela Cruz of the Philippines Educational Theater Association (PETA) who spoke on participatory theater in the Philippines and ran an immersive theater workshop for students.

Student Support

Support for students is the second core pillar of the SEAI, most visibly through its research and language grant programs, which aim to make academic work in the region accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students. As Southeast Asia-focused programming grows, student engagement has steadily increased—a trend that is expected to continue. 

In 2025–26, SEAI awarded research travel grants to 6 undergraduates and 23 graduate students, reflecting broad interdisciplinary interest in the region’s social, historical, and developmental dynamics. Funded projects explored topics such as religion, folklore, public health, education, migration, infrastructure, environmental change, and cultural identity. Examples included mapping Buddhist temple networks in Vietnam and the Philippines, studying agrarian transitions in Malaysia, examining curriculum reform in Indonesia, analyzing refugee politics, and investigating climate action by Global South firms. SEAI also supported graduate summer language study in Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese.

Student engagement extended beyond research. In collaboration with student organizations, SEAI supported the 2nd annual Southeast Asia Visibility Week—a multi-day series of cultural and academic events. Additionally, in 2025–26, SEAI supported several group trips to the region. These included the Harvard Philippine Forum Service Trip and a Thailand Trek organized by students in the Harvard Kennedy School.

The fourth annual Harvard-Yale Southeast Asia Graduate Student Conference took place in April 2026. Organized by graduate students from Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, the conference featured panels on Malay manuscript studies, transnational perspectives on Southeast Asian literatures and media, new directions in infrastructure studies, and modern and contemporary Southeast Asian art.

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