Main Committee
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Adam D. Tyson, PhD
Dr. Adam Tyson is a lecturer in Southeast Asian Politics at the School of Politics and International Studies of the University of Leeds.
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Al Makin, PhD
Dr. Al Makin obtained his PhD in Philosophy/Islamic Studies from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. He is currently a Lecturer at the State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga, Yogyakarta and Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies joint program of Sunan Kalijaga, Gajah Mada, and Duta Wacana Universities. His books include Representing the Enemy: Musaylima in Muslim Literature (Peter Lang, 2010), and the forthcoming Challenging Orthodoxy: Study of Lia Eden (Springer). Al Makin is currently the Editor in Chief of Al Jam’iah, an international journal of Islamic studies (indexed by Scopus, Pro-quest and Ebscho) and head of the research center at Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University, Yogyakarta.
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Bianca J. Smith, PhD
Dr. Bianca Smith is an anthropologist specialising in gender, women’s spirituality, Sufism and Islam in Indonesia. She is an Honorary Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne, having obtained her PhD in Anthropology from Monash University. Bianca has previously received two Australia Endeavour Awards for Research in Asia, which she held at Gadjah Mada University and Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University in Yogyakarta in 2006 and 2008 respectively. She was a Senior Lecturer in Sociology-Anthropology and Coordinator of Gender Studies at Universiti Brunei Darussalam from 2010 to 2014. Her current research concerns gender and Sufism in the Nahdlatul Wathan Islamic organisation in Lombok and women’s spirituality in Sufi groups in Kalimantan. Further information is available at the University of Melbourne, Google Scholar, and Academia.edu.
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Fatimah Husein, PhD
Dr. Fatimah Husein is an associate professor at the Sunan Kalijaga State Islamic University, Yogyakarta. She was awarded her PhD in Indonesian/Islamic Studies from the University of Melbourne in 2004, and master degree in Islamic Philosophy from McGill University in 1997. Her current teaching and research areas include Inter-religious Dialogue, Philosophy of Religion, and Islam and Social Media in Indonesia. She is currently involved in a three-year research project titled “Islamic (Inter)Faces of the Internet: Emerging Socialities and Forms of Piety in Indonesia” (2014-2017). Fatimah has recently been inaugurated as Director of Research and Community Engagement at the same university (2015-2019). Her collaboration with Prof. Stefan Hammer of the University of Vienna recently resulted in an edited book, Religious Pluralism and Religious Freedom: Religions, Society and the State in Dialogue (2013).
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Frank Dhont, PhD (chairman)
Dr. Frank Dhont is Associate Professor, Department of History, National Cheng Kung University. He previously worked as Senior Lecturer in FASS-IAS, University of Brunei Darussalam. He obtained a PhD in History from Yale University specializing in history of Indonesia and Southeast Asia. He also holds an MHum in history from Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia) as well as an MA in Indonesian from Lund University (Sweden). As Indonesianist, he is regularly involved in multidisciplinary initiatives and is founder and chair of the International Indonesia Forum. His major research interests include the reactions of both indigenous rulers and ordinary people to Japanese colonialism in the Netherlands Indies and Southeast Asia during World War II. He is also interested in the history of both World Wars in Asia and the spread of ideologies such as nationalism and Islam, especially in the context of colonial empires in Asia.
Godlif Sianipar was born in Medan and is currently the Vice-President IV for international cooperation of the Catholic University of Saint Thomas, Medan, Indonesia. He is a professor of sociology and graduated from the Catholic University of America in Washington DC and the University of Newcastle, NSW- Australia.
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Imron Rosidi is a professor of Sociology of Islam at Sultan Syarif Kasim State Islamic University (UIN) in Riau, Indonesia. He earned his PhD from Universiti Brunei Darussalam in 2016 and obtained his master’s degree from Leiden University in 2008. As an academic, Rosidi has contributed articles to a variety of journals, including Media Asia, Contemporary Islam, and Plaridel, among others. He wrote a book titled Sosiologi Islam in 2024. His research interests focus on the study of Islam and Muslim societies, with a particular emphasis on Indonesia.
Jennifer Goodlander, PhD
Dr. Jennifer Goodlander researches puppetry in Southeast Asia as it articulates local and regional identities. She has published and presented in international journals and conferences. Her book, Women in the Shadows: Gender, Puppets, and the Power of Tradition in Bali will be published by Ohio University Press in 2016. Further information about her, including her contact information, is available at her website.
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Jesse Hession Grayman, PhD
Dr. Jesse Hession Grayman is a Senior Lecturer in Development Studies at the University of Auckland’s School of Social Sciences in New Zealand. He holds a PhD in Social and Medical Anthropology from Harvard University, an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from the University of Michigan, and an MPH in Epidemiology, also from the University of Michigan. His research interests include humanitarian recovery (specifically the role of both international agencies and local civil society in the response to crisis events) and community-driven development programs (particularly in the health sector).
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Jörgen Hellman, PhD
Dr. Jörgen Hellman is a senior lecturer of Social Anthropology at the School of Global Studies, Gothenburg University, Sweden. He has accumulated more than 28 months of fieldwork in West Java, researching such topics as the revitalisation of traditional theater, ritual fasting, and religious pilgrimages. His current research is into the self-organization of civil society in Jakarta during flooding, as well as the role of ancestors in shaping the political future of Indonesia.
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Lukas S. Ispandriarno, PhD
Dr. Lukas Suryanto Ispandriarno is a lecturer at the Communications Science Department of the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences, Atma Jaya Yogyakarta. He received his PhD from the Ilmenau University of Technology in Germany with the thesis “Political Communication in Indonesia: An Analysis of Freedom of the Press during Transition Process (1999-2004)”. His research focuses on journalism, political communication, and media ethics.
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A specialist in the culture and politics of Indonesia, Niruban Balachandran is an American of Sri Lankan descent and the East-West Center’s Director of the Professional Development Program. His career has spanned more than two decades in foreign policy, international aid, strategy, and education in the United States, Southeast Asia, and China. Previously, he served in the U.S. Institute of Peace as the lead peace and security research consultant for its Indonesia scoping study, and in the World Bank’s Indonesia office for seven years, leading programs in rural village development, governance, and environmental protection. Publishers of his work include the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Yale Global, and the East-West Center, as well as academic and general interest outlets in the U.S. and abroad. Mr. Balachandran holds an MPA from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and a BA from Rutgers University. In 2019, he was honored by the New America Foundation as one of 40 AAPI National Security Next Generation Leaders. He is proficient in the Indonesian language, and is a Truman National Security Fellow.
Phillip Drake, PhD
Dr. Phillip Drake is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kansas. His teaching and research focuses on environmental literature and rhetoric, science and technology studies, political ecology in Southeast Asia, and cultural studies.
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Phillip King, PhD
Dr. Phillip King earned his PhD in history from the University of Wollongong, Australia. His thesis was an examination of alternative histories in the Thai-Malay borderlands of the Malay Peninsula. Between 2005 and 2012 he served as the Resident Director for the Australian Consortium for In-Country Indonesian Studies (ACICIS) and currently sits on the National Reference Group for the consortium. He currently works as a consultant on a range of basic and higher education programs in Indonesia.
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Roberto Akyuwen, PhD
Dr. Roberto Akyuwen is Senior Executive Analyst for MFI Development, the Indonesia Financial Service Authority.
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Rommel A. Curaming, PhD
Dr. Rommel Curaming is a lecturer at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His research interests encompass history and the memory of violence, heritage and the public consumption of history, comparative history and historiography, the politics of knowledge production, and State-Intellectual relations, particularly as related to Indonesia and the Philippines.
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Rosdiana Sijabat, PhD
Dr Rosdiana Sijabat is a lecturer at the Department of Business Administration, Faculty of Economics and Business, Atma Jaya Catholic University of Indonesia, Jakarta. She completed her PhD at Flinders University, Australia. Her Bachelor (cum laude) and Master in Economics degrees were obtained from Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. She has focused her research on public finances and fiscal federalism. Her other expertise includes education economics, applied economics, and policy analysis. Some of her experiences are with Centre for Economics of Public Policy Study (CEPPS), Centre Asia Pacific Studies and USAID Project at Gadjah Mada University. She has done considerable research into her interests and has presented various papers at international conferences such as the Annual Conference of the Australia and New Zealand Regional Science Association, the Biennial Asian Studies Association of Australia Conference, Indonesian Regional Science Association Conference, and the Indonesian Students International Conference.
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Stephen C. Druce, PhD
Dr. Stephen Druce is Deputy Director of the Academy of Brunei Studies and Associate Researcher in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam. His main research interests include pre-modern Southeast Asian history and archaeology; the transmission and transformation of Southeast Asian oral and written historical traditions; the ethnohistory of Sulawesi and Borneo; and conflict management in the Asia-Pacific region. Major works include The Lands West of the Lakes: A history of the Ajattappareng kingdoms of South Sulawesi 1200 to 1600 CE (KITLV Press, 2009), an edited special issue themed Orality Writing and History: The Literature of the Bugis and Makasar of South Sulawesi, International Journal of Asia Pacific Studies, vol. 12, Sup. 1 (2016), Origins, History and Social Structure in Brunei Darussalam (with Victor T. King, Routledge, 2021) and Continuity and Change in Brunei Darussalam (with Victor T. King, Routledge, 2021).
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Syuan-Yuan Chiou, PhD
Dr. Syuan-yuan Chiou is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology, National Cheng-chi University, Taiwan. He received his PhD from Utrecht University in 2012 and has published several journal articles and book chapters about Chinese-Indonesian Muslims. He is currently conducting researches regarding Chinese-Indonesian popular religions in north coastal cities of central Java and transnational Indonesian Muslim communities in Taiwan.
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Thomas J. Conners, PhD
Dr. Thomas Conners is an associate research scientist at the Center for Advanced Study of Language at the University of Maryland. He completed his doctoral studies at Yale University, receiving a PhD in Linguistics with his dissertation on Tengger Javanese. Aside from Javanese dialectology, his research interests encompass Austronesian, Indonesian, and Javanese linguistics; syntax; historical linguistics; field linguistics; language death; and language contact.
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Tracy Wright Webster, PhD
Dr. Tracy Wright Webster graduated with a PhD in Asian Studies (specializing in Indonesian studies) from the University of Western Australia in 2010. Her dissertation, “Pergaulan bebas and gendered youth culture in Yogyakarta, Indonesia” analysed the moral panic surrounding youth sexuality. Tracy was subsequently granted an Endeavour Award research fellowship, focusing on Early Marriage in Yogyakarta, in affiliation with the Women’s Study Centre of UIN Yogyakarta. She has since spent several years working on the restoration of the R.A. Kartini Museum in Jepara. Tracy’s research interests encompass gender, sexuality, feminist and women’s issues, poverty alleviation, education, sustainability and the environment. She has published several articles on female same-sex relations, youth culture and early marriage.
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William P. Tuchrello
William P. Tuchrello has over 30 years of field research and diplomatic service serving in the Washington, Indonesia, South Asia, and Egypt for the Library of Congress and Congressional foreign affairs committees, with a specific academic focus on Southeast Asia, where he lived for 20 years. He holds a M.A. in Theology, M.A.I.A. in South East Asian International Relations from Ohio University, a M.L.S. in Library Administration from Rutgers University, and an A.B. from Heidelberg College in History. His additional educational experience includes serving as Director for Fulbright Indonesia, Thessaloniki Greece, senior Fulbright lecturer at Universitas Hasanuddin, the University of California, San Diego, Northern Greece and Northern Thailand. Mr. Tuchrello has published monographs about Burma, written articles and lectured on Southeast Asia and information science, and curated a major exhibit on U.S. – Thai historical relations. He is currently a board member for the San Diego Fulbright Alumni Association and the South Asian Arts Council of the San Diego Museum of Art board member.
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Yuwanto, PhD
Dr. Yuwanto completed his PhD studies at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea, defending his dissertation “Role of Voluntary Associations and Social Capital in South Korea’s Democratic Consolidation”. He is now a lecturer at the Faculty of Social and Political Sciences of Diponegoro University in Semarang. His research interests include Korean politics and foreign policy; democratization, civil society, and social movements; political economy; and comparative policy, governmental innovation, and decentralization.
Administrative Coordinators
Christopher A. Woodrich (chief)
Christopher Woodrich is an independent researcher based out of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and a doctorate candidate at Gadjah Mada University. His research interests include Indonesian popular culture, particularly Dutch East Indies-era cinema and literature, as well as the overlap between different forms of media. His book Ekranisasi Awal: Adapting Films to the Silver Screen in the Dutch East Indies was published by Gadjah Mada University Press in 2017.
Hastangka
Naning Margasari
Silverio R.L. Aji Sampurno
Stefanus Nindito