Thongchai Winichakul
Professor
Director of Graduate Studies

eMail: twinicha@wisc.edu
Phone: (608)263-8931
Office: 5211 Mosse Humanities
Mailbox: 5043 Mosse Humanities

Curriculum Vitae: View PDF

Office Hours: Mondays 11:00 - 12:00 & 1:00 - 2:00

Education: PhD: University of Sydney; MA: University of Sydney; BA: Thammasat University (Thailand)

Bio Sketch:

Born and growing up in Bangkok, Thailand, I came to UW in 1991.  I enjoy the opportunity to remain active in both the American and Thai academics.

Research Interests:

Cultural and intellectual history of early modern and modern Southeast Asia (the nineteenth century to early twentieth century), especially the encounters between Southeast Asian societies and the West; history of Siam/Thailand, especially of various knowledge, ideas and thinkers, and the modern Thai cultural politics from the late nineteenth century to the present; nationalism; geography, mapping, dangerous history, memory and how societies deal with such troubling past.

Selected Publications:

• 1994    Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
• 2003    “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Post-National Histories in Southeast Asia”, leading article in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, ed. Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee, Athens: Ohio University Press, pp. 3-29.
• 2002    “Remembering/ Silencing the Traumatic Past: the Ambivalent Memories of the October 1976 Massacre in Bangkok" in Cultural Crisis and Social Memory: Modernity and Identity in Thailand and Laos, ed. Charles F Keyes and Shigeharu Tanabe, London and New York: Routledge/ Curzon, pp. 243-283.
• 2000    “The Quest for ‘Siwilai’: A geographical discourse of Civilizational Thinking in the Late 19th and early 20th Century Siam”, Journal of Asian Studies 59, 3 (Aug 2000): 528-549.
• 2000    "The Others Within: Travel and Ethno-spatial Differentiation of Siamese Subjects, 1885-1910," lead article in Civility and Savagery: Social Identity in Tai States, ed. Andrew Turton, London: Curzon Press, pp. 38-62.

Awards:

• 2004 - Grand Prize for the Asia Pacific Book Award from the Asian Affairs Research Council, Japan
• 2003 - Elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, class of 2003
• 1994/95 - The John Simon Guggenheim Award
• 1995 - The Harry J. Benda Award, Association for Asian Studies, for the book Siam Mapped.

Courses Taught:

Lecture Courses:

• History 438 - Buddhism and Society in Southeast Asian History - Syllabus 2008 (pdf)
• History 457 - History of Southeat Asia to 1800 - Syllabus 2008 (pdf)

Undergraduate Seminars:

• History 283 - Intermediate Honors Seminar - Topics: "Studies in History"
• History 500 - Reading Seminar in History
• History 600 - Advanced Seminar in History - Topics: "Orientalism: The Others in our Knowledge" - Syllabus 2006

Graduate Courses:

• History 703 - History and Theory - Topics: "Geography at Work in History " - Syllabus 2008 (pdf)
• History 753 - Seminar in Comparative World History
• History 755 - Pro-seminar in Southeast Asian History - Topics: "State and Society in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia" - Syllabus 2005 (pdf)