Harvard-Yale 4th Southeast Asian Studies Graduate Conference
April 3-4, 2026
Cambridge, Massachusetts
CALL FOR PAPERS
Authored by Nicole Yow Wei
We are pleased to announce the Harvard–Yale Southeast Asia Studies Graduate Student Conference 2026, hosted at Harvard University from April 3-4, 2026. The theme for this year’s conference is “Form and Formlessness.” In conceiving such a theme we have not intended to prohibitively delimit the itinerary our discussions would take; conversely, we hope that it shall rejuvenate the frame of reference from which the study of Southeast Asia proceeds.
We invite graduate students across all disciplines to interpret the concept of Form (and its cognate, Formlessness) capaciously and across various contexts – be they textual, aesthetic, social, built, political, performance, or material form; to name a few. How do centralizing questions of Form create opportunities to re-examine exhausted categories in the humanistic study of Southeast Asia? How are Form and processes of political negotiation dialectically co-creative? How has Form historically conditioned essentialist conceptions of region and country? How might Southeast Asian ontologies provide us with new possibilities for reconsidering Form and its place in Southeast Asian communities? Could a return to Form shed new light on culturalist ideas of Southeast Asia as a ‘crossroads’ of “world” languages, political philosophies, and religious traditions? To what extent do conventional methodologies around the description and analysis of Form enable us to be sensitive to lived experience and phenomenology in and of Southeast Asia? How can Indigeneity be reconsidered through the parsing of Form in the region? Accordingly, what methodologies might re-centering Form legitimate? Is a commitment to the articulation of Form in Southeast Asia necessary for its eventual deconstruction?
This year’s theme of “Form and Formlessness” is also a challenge we issue to participants; to revisit the appellations of texts, objects, and phenomena—variously as imitations, originals, adaptations, and episodes, among others. What temporalities or relations do these categories subtend? This harkens back to a conversation sparked most classically by J.R.W. Smail in 1961 around “the possibility of an Autonomous History of Southeast Asia.” We return to this open question with the benefit of decades more empirical and theoretical advancement in our understanding of Southeast Asian forms. What does it mean to be ‘autonomous,’ and what does autonomy mean for the purveyors of Southeast Asia form? Worded more reflexively, what ideas of a Southeast Asian ‘Self’ does this imply—and what are the attendant anatomies of autonomous agency held within these implications? Inquiry into form also invites inquiry into the labor process of their creation. For instance: The question “what is an original?” invites the corresponding, “what is creativity?”
Drawing upon the research strengths of scholars of Southeast Asia at Harvard and Yale, this conference aims to support graduate students at all stages of their academic careers, be it early dissertation research, fieldwork research, dissertation writing, and monograph development. The key goal of this conference is to afford researchers the space to present their research and receive in-depth feedback.
PANELS
The following panels are soliciting abstract submissions, centered around the following time-periods, sub-disciplines, and thematic interests:
Panel 1: New approaches to Malay manuscript studies [nicole.yow@yale.edu]
Panel 2: Comparative literary studies, inter- and trans-cultural textual movements, multilingualism and literary translation [cpham@g.harvard.edu]
Panel 3: Infrastructure studies, geopolitical entanglements, media cultures and technologies [dn2610@columbia.edu]
Panel 4: Aesthetic Genealogies of Southeast Asian Modern and Contemporary Art [tobywu@g.harvard.edu]
CONFERENCE PROGRAMMING
The conference is tentatively structured across two days, featuring 3 keynote speakers (Senior Scholar, Junior Scholar, Practitioner). The rough schedule is as follows:
Day 1 (April 3rd): Keynote 1, Professionalisation Lunchtime Talk, 2x Conference Panels, Keynote 2, Conference Dinner
Day 2 (April 4th): Keynote 3, 2x Conference Panels, Community Conversation
We highly encourage all participants to be fully present for the entirety of both conference days.
Previous editions of the conference have featured keynote speakers Professor Anna L. Tsing, Professor Nurfadzilah Yahaya, and Professor Thongchai Winichakul, with ancillary programming with Harvard Asia Center Publications and a film screening featuring Tan Pin Pin.
MODALITY
The Conference will be hosted in person. Limited funding for participant travel may be offered based on need. We generally offer travel stipends based on region. Exceptional cases will be considered on a case-by-case basis. Please provide a budget and a 100-word statement of need; more instructions are noted in the application form.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS
Requirements: Please submit a 300-word abstract, a 100-word bio, and a 2-page maximum CV in a single PDF document, and any audiovisual accommodations through the online form: https://bit.ly/HYSEASGSC26.
The online form is hosted on Google Forms and will require a Gmail login. Should this present a problem, please email asiacenter_southeastasia@harvard.edu.
TIMELINE
Abstracts will be accepted until October 15, 2025, and accepted participants will be notified by the end of November 2025. Workshop presenters will be expected to submit their papers (capped at 8,000 words) by March 3, 2026.
ELIGIBILITY
We accept submissions from Master’s, pre-dissertation, dissertation-writing, and recently graduated doctoral students. We regrettably cannot accept abstracts from full-time faculty—although part-time faculty who are current graduate students are welcome to submit. We especially encourage students at Southeast Asian universities, as well as graduate students working on less-represented polities, identity groups, religious traditions, and cultures in Southeast Asia, to apply.
Please contact asiacenter_southeastasia@harvard.edu for any clarifications.
Conference Organizers
Camellia Pham (Harvard University, Comparative Literature)
Dien-min Loong (Yale University, History)
Ton-Nu Nguyen-Dinh (Columbia University, History)
Toby Wu (Harvard University, Art, Film and Visual Studies)
Nicole Yow Wei (Yale University, History and Early Modern Studies)