GETSEA is accepting applications from early-stage PhD students for four two-year mentoring clusters in Southeast Asian studies.
In the context of reduced PhD admissions and funding in the U.S. and the disappearance of in-person cohort-building opportunities, GETSEA seeks to support and match faculty who focus on Southeast Asia with graduate students who would benefit from area-focused mentorship and working with peers with intersecting interests.
Each cluster will bring together four to five graduate students for regular virtual meetings, collaborative discussion, research development, and at least one in-person gathering. Selected students will receive a $1,000 award to support travel to the gathering.
Applicants must be enrolled in a PhD program and be pre-exam and pre-field research. The opportunity is open to all students of Southeast Asian studies but priority will be given to students at U.S. institutions, with the aim of building cohesion and productive synergies within the cohort.
From 2026-2028, we are hosting four mentoring clusters. Full details below.
Applications for each cluster are due October 1, 2026.
Youth/Gender/Sexuality Activism in Southeast Asia
Meredith Weiss (Political Science, University at Albany, SUNY)
Among the most exciting, and also most challenging, topics to study in Southeast Asia is activism, whatever its ideological flavor, objectives, protagonists, or targets. Not only must the researcher keen to explore such efforts navigate through ethical minefields—particularly where activists brave especial stigma, disapprobation, or risk—but they may face, too, particular hurdles in positioning work that is likely to be inherently, richly interdisciplinary for discipline-specific academic gatekeepers. This mentoring cluster will bring together social science and humanities PhD students to tackle these challenges. Focusing on youth activism and/or activism around gender/sexuality—our precise focus and title will depend on proposals received—the cluster aims to build not only research skills and concrete knowledge, but also confidence to take on sometimes fraught, confronting, and difficult research. Undergirding our effort will be a collective dive into practical research ethics, including how to be self-reflexive, recognizing both oneself and one’s interlocutors as agents in the research process, without becoming paralyzed, and how to maintain a critical perspective without abusing trust (or getting unduly cynical or depressed). Throughout, we will work our way through a participant-generated reading list and set of key concerns and objectives. We will conclude our series of periodic virtual meetings (punctuated by one in-person meeting at a location TBD) by workshopping each participant’s draft prospectus/proposal, ending with a plan for ongoing check-ins.
Lao Spaces
Ian Baird (Geography and Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison)
The Lao Spaces early PhD student mentoring cluster will include students in one of more of the following:
- All peoples and places within Laos, including those occupied by various Indigenous and ethnic minority groups
- Ethnic Lao spaces in Thailand, mainly northeastern Thailand
- Ethnic Lao spaces in Cambodia, mainly northeastern Cambodia
- Tai-language speaking spaces in Vietnam
- Tai-language speaking spaces in China
- Diasporic groups from Laos (including Lao, Hmong, Iu-Mien, Khmu, etc.) in the United States, Canada, France, Australia and elsewhere in the world
The specific direction of the mentoring group will be determined during consultation participants. Ian Baird has broad topical interests in relation to socio-cultural, environment, development, Indigenous peoples, gender, religion, historical, and politics. Efforts will be made to strengthen the cohort of PhD students working in Lao spaces, including sharing knowledge, writings and ideas. The group will meet once a month online via Zoom. We will also meet at least once in-person for some meaningful engagement, either before or after the AAS, or separately at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Cambodian Cultural & Diasporic Studies
Jenna Grant (Anthropology, University of Washington) & Sophea Seng (Asian American Studies, California State University Long Beach)
This mentoring cluster will support an interdisciplinary cohort of students doing research related to Cambodia and its diaspora. Our launch activity, digital storytelling, will include introductions through an exploration of music and foodways. Our regular meetings, roughly every other month, will include 1) check-ins, centered around a material or Khmer term, and 2) discussion of a text or film, with attention to methods and form. The “bring your material” exercise encourages students to seek out and connect to materials of their research. The discussion of texts builds a shared conceptual and methodological vocabulary, and helps students think about the situatedness of their research in concrete terms. Students will workshop a pilot research funding proposal at an in-person meeting in year 2 (location TBD—Long Beach, Phnom Penh, Seattle).
Literary and Cultural Studies of the Malay Archipelago
Nazry Bahrawi (Asian Languages & Literature, University of Washington)
What defines a region? The Malay Archipelago presents an intriguing case to unravelling this puzzle of curated kinship. Despite the adjective ‘Malay’, the collective of archipelagic territories in Southeast Asia has also been imagined as Nanyang by various Chinese peoples, Suvarnadvipa pointing to its Hindu-Buddhist influences, and more recently, Nusantaria to factor in the Philippines. It is a conundrum that is perhaps best approached through a deeper analysis of cultural products by some of the region’s most creative minds. This is the task that will be performed by the participants of this PhD mentoring cluster through interpretative sessions that will wrestle with the meanings and ideas behind selected films, modern novels and classics over the course of two years. To buttress this interpretative work, participants will read carefully chosen humanities and social science texts through the themes of critical theory, literature and culture, environmental humanities, as well as race and religion, favoring work that centers local and autonomous knowledges and expertise. The cluster meets online roughly once a month with the aim of organizing an in-person meeting at a professional conference.
For Faculty Applicants
Applicants must identify the country (or countries) of focus and/or a broad theme that would provide a productive basis for a mentoring cluster. The application also requires a short proposal describing the vision for the cohort and the types of regular activities and interactions that are envisioned over the two-year period. Possibilities include shared book-reading/film screenings each semester, virtual class attendance in a course taught by the mentor, a mechanism for the cohort to share research proposals and other work. The expectation is that there will be (at least) one in-person meeting during duration of the cohort—either in the U.S. (eg. at AAS, the mentor’s institution, a library collection of interest to the group) or in Southeast Asia. Adjustments can be made to accommodate the interests and input of student participants who can also be enlisted to help with ideas and logistics.
The deadline has passed for faculty mentors to create clusters for 2026-2028, but feel free to reach out to us at getsea@cornell.edu for more information.
Students, if you scrolled too far, scroll back up for application links for each mentoring cluster.