Biography
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.
Education
Ph.D., University of Sydney
M.A., University of Sydney
B.A., Thammasat University (Thailand)
Books
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Thongchai Winichakul. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994.
Selected Publications
- 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 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.
- 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.
Selected 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.
History Courses Taught
- History 283 – Intermediate Honors Seminar – Topics: “Studies in History”
- History 438 – Buddhism and Society in Southeast Asian History
- History 457 – History of Southeat Asia to 1800
- History 500 – Reading Seminar in History
- History 600 – Orientalism: The Others in our Knowledge
- History 703 – Geography at Work in History
- History 753 – Seminar in Comparative World History
- History 755 – State and Society in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia