South-East Asian Connections: Art, History, and Archipelagos

The canon of Islamic art history has long been shaped by exclusions—none more consequential than the omission of Southeast Asia, home to the world’s largest Muslim population. Recent scholarship has begun to address this gap while also examining its roots in colonial taxonomies of culture. This series presents art, history, and historiography from the Southeast Asian archipelagic region through its oceanic orientation—foregrounding histories of circulation, extraction, and encounter. It interrogates the boundaries that have traditionally divided material culture into binaries: art and ethnography, sacred and secular, text and image, high and low, modern and premodern. Through both historical and contemporary case studies, the series invites reflection on emerging collaborative initiatives and critical methodologies that reshape how we think about the use, perception, power, and care of objects and environments.

This series is supported by the Institute's Gulnar Bosch Fund.

Organized by Finbarr Barry Flood, Dipti Khera, and Prita Meier

Program Schedule

Fall 2025

Thursday, September 25, 2025, 6:30pm
Indonesia’s Islamic heritage and the aftermath of colonialism
Mirjam Shatanawi, Reinwardt Academy (Amsterdam University of the Arts) & Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden

Thursday, November 13, 2025 6:30pm
Love, Desire, and Death: Charms from Islamicate Southeast Asia
Teren Sevea, Harvard University & Faizah Zakaria, National University of Singapore

Spring 2026

Thursday, February 19, 2026, 6:30pm
Logics of Localisation: Vernacular Islamic tombstone traditions of Sumatra
Jessica Rahardjo, SOAS University of London & University of Oxford

Thursday, April 16, 2026, 6:30pm
Faith in the Unknown
Anissa Rahadiningtyas, National Gallery Singapore