About the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium
We aim to develop institutional infrastructure and robust connections across New York’s public university systems—the 64-campus, 370,000-student State University of New York (SUNY) and 25-campus, 270,000-student City University of New York (CUNY)—with the wider New York public and policy community, and with counterparts in Southeast Asia. Our statewide Southeast Asia Consortium (SEAC) links faculty, students, alumni, and surrounding communities.
Our core objectives include:
Enhancement of Southeast Asia-related scholarly infrastructure for teaching and research, to benefit both Southeast Asian-identified and Southeast Asia-focused students and researchers;
Developing and enhancing collaborations and networks, both across New York and between the US and Southeast Asia; and
Work in new and emerging areas of inquiry, through grants to support teaching and research around a signature annual theme.
In each of the first three years, we will delve into one interdisciplinary theme, through curricular, research, and public-outreach components: Sites and spaces of mobilization and protest (2023-24); Southeast Asian identities in popular culture and literature (2024-25); and Climate change, sustainability, and geography (2025-26). Supplementing that targeted focus will be a mix of programming that targets undergraduate through doctoral students, faculty and other researchers across the SUNY and CUNY systems, and the surrounding public, to create a sustainable, fruitful legacy of networks, expertise, and materials.
Modular components focus on teaching, research, publication, and outreach.
Theme course
Lead faculty will coordinate an interdisciplinary course, offered through both SUNY and CUNY, in line with that year’s theme. (Students will register through their home university system.) The course will draw on guest lecturers from the SEASIA (Consortium for Southeast Asian Studies in Asia) network, to build Asia-wide connections, as well as SUNY/CUNY faculty. The course will ensure all CUNY/SUNY students have access to at least one Southeast Asia-focused course annually.
Annual workshop, field school, & curricular modules
Research workshop Lead faculty will organize a workshop in Southeast Asia around each year’s theme, coordinating with regional partners. Participation will be open to SUNY/CUNY faculty and students (graduate or advanced undergraduate, prioritizing theme-course participants), joined by locally based faculty, researchers, activists, and students.
Field school The workshop will conclude with a week-long experiential field school for SUNY/CUNY students, plus local counterparts. Participants will attend the workshop, then stay for the field school.
Curricular modules Each year’s workshop will include a pedagogy-specialist–led session in which participants will develop case studies, modules, or online materials that non-area-specialist colleagues can adopt to add Southeast Asia content to other courses.
Engaging the wider public
We will coordinate with the New York Southeast Asia Network (NYSEAN) to offer two public, hybrid-modality events per semester: one seminar on a topic in line with that year’s theme, and one speaker or panel addressing a current issue in the region or affecting Southeast Asian Americans.
Support for research & publication
SEAC will award summer/sabbatical research grants for faculty, and pre-dissertation/dissertation research grants for graduate students, for research (including language-training) in Southeast Asia; projects need not address the annual theme. We will also award subventions for publishing, open-access, and translation costs, as well as in-person or hybrid proposal/manuscript workshops.
Forging a regional network
Coordinating with the University of the Philippines–Diliman’s Asian Center, we will work to develop two databases:
Of Southeast Asia-focused faculty in SEASIA-affiliated universities, to inform selection of guest speakers for the annual theme course and as potential collaborators/mentors for SUNY/CUNY researchers and students.
Of SUNY/CUNY alumni in Southeast Asia, who can be included in SEAC communications/activities and serve as resource-persons especially for SUNY/CUNY students.
In year 4 (2026-27), we will focus on ensuring institutionalization and sustainability. Central to that effort will be our commissioning of new undergraduate or graduate courses, all of which CUNY and SUNY faculty can offer on an ongoing basis, even without additional external funding. These courses will fall under three categories:
Linked courses developed by Southeast Asianist–non-Southeast Asianist tandems, using the approach of the Common Problems Project (CP2): students in classes across disciplines will propose solutions to a real-world, Southeast Asia-related problem.
Collaborative International Online Learning (COIL) classes pairing Southeast Asia classes at CUNY/SUNY with classes of colleagues from SEASIA institutions; students in these classes will engage virtually cross-nationally, in fully or partly collaborative courses.
Faculty-led, winter- or summer-session study abroad courses, partnering with the institutions with which we collaborated for research workshops and field schools over the preceding three years.
We have a unique opportunity to make New York’s public university systems a hub for the study of Southeast Asia. In the process, we will model the integration of area-studies and diaspora-focused teaching and research, across institutions.