About Us

EA Darith is Visiting Senior Fellow at NSC. He is also Deputy Director of the Department of Conservation of the Monuments Outside Angkor Park, APSARA (Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap), Cambodia. He has coordinated projects between APSARA and other international teams from Japan, France, USA, Australia, Hungary, Thailand, and Singapore.

Darith received his BA from Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, his MA from Kyoto University, and PhD from Osaka Ohtani University. His research interest is in Southeast Asian ceramics, especially Khmer ceramics in Angkor period from 9th to 15th centuries. He has excavated more than 10 stoneware kilns and other monument sites in Angkor region since 2000, and has reconstructed the history and development of Angkorian ceramics and kilns. He plans to further study the scientific analysis of Angkorian stoneware with counterparts from Hawaii University, Santa Clara University (USA) and New England University (Australia) to better understand the origin of Khmer production and the expansion of the use of Angkorian stoneware.

Darith is also a lecturer of Angkorian Stoneware Ceramics at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, and teaches history of Cambodia and Khmer Studies at Pannasatra University. He has received training from Arizona State Museum, Freer and Sackler Museum at Smithsonian, and University of Pennsylvania Museum. He is working on creating an artefact management system in Angkor which will aid in the proper care of all artefacts excavated from the Angkor World Heritage Site.

Tony Day grew up in Washington D.C., received a B.A. (cum laude) in History and Literature from Harvard University in 1967 and a PhD in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University in 1981. In 1967-1969 he was a Peace Corps Volunteer in Calapan, Mindoro Oriental, the Philippines, and from 1978 to1998 he taught Southeast Asian and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. In 2004-2005 he was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre of the Australian National University and a Fellow of the National Humanities Center, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. From 2006-2012 he was a part-time visiting professor of history at Wesleyan University, Middletown CT.

Tony Day’s publications include Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia (2002); Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature (2002), edited with Keith Foulcher; Identifying with Freedom: Indonesia after Suharto (ed., 2007); and Cultures at War: The Cold War and Cultural Expression in Southeast Asia (2010), edited with Maya Liem. He is currently Regional Editor for South East Asia Research. In August 2013 he moved to Singapore with his wife and youngest son.

Edmund Edwards McKinnon has been intermittently resident in Southeast Asia since 1960. He studied agriculture at the Edinburgh and East of Scotland College of Agriculture and thereafter held posts in plantation agriculture in Indonesia and South India. He discovered the mediaeval harbour site of Kota Cina near Belawan, Deli in 1972 and since then has been involved in archaeological and art historical research in Sumatra. He has gone on to identify several mediaeval settlement sites in north Sumatra and Aceh, including Kota Rentang, as well as Pulau Kompeh in Aru bay and the Pancu / Lambaroneujid site west of Banda Aceh. He noted the destruction of prehistoric shell middens at Hinai in the early 1970s and thereafter became interested in mediaeval export ceramic wares.

Ed has been involved in excavation work at Kota Cina and Kota Rentang in north Sumatra; in Palembang and Batujaya with the École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), at Cot Me near Ladong; and at Lhok Cut, Lamreh, Aceh Besar regency with the Earth Observatory of Singapore, helping to recover evidence of historical tsunamis in the Aceh region.

His current interests include mediaeval inter-regional commerce between the Middle East, South Asia and China, the trading activities of the Tamil guilds and their cultural and linguistic impact on the Karo element of north Sumatra; the arrival of Islam, mediaeval trade ceramics, including South Asian red earthen wares and Chinese and Southeast Asian stonewares; and early Dutch colonial accounts of the hinterland of Kota Cina, in particular the Karo area of northern Sumatra.

Chang Yufen is Visiting Fellow at NSC. She received her PhD in sociology from University of Michigan in May 2013. She spent a year as a postdoctoral fellow at Asia Research Institute before assuming the position of Visiting Fellow with the NSC at ISEAS. Her dissertation deals with how the mechanisms of emulation, differentiation, and hybridization shaped the formative process of the vernacular literature in colonial Vietnam. While at ISEAS, she will work on a project about pre-colonial Sino-Vietnamese translation. Her research interests include colonial Vietnamese nationalism, China-Southeast Asian cultural interconnections, translation, and Chinese-ness.

Dr Ding Choo Ming is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Centre and Professor and Principal Research Fellow at ATMA (Institut Alam & Tamadun Melayu) or the Institute of the Malay World and Civilization, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. His research interests include Malay literature in the Riau Islands, authorship of Malay hikayat of 19th century, Malay world’s pantun and local knowledge in the Malay World. He has published in international journals and is the editor of the Journal Terjemahan Alam & Tamadun Melayu (2009–present).

Dr Ding’s recent and forthcoming publications include Pantun Baba Pilihan di Negeri Selat 1920-1940 (Penang: USM Press 2012); Kajian Baru Manuskrip dan Pantun Melayu (ATMA, 2012); Dari Sitiawan ke Bangi: Koleksi Esei tentang Sejarah Perkembangan Masa Lalu dan Cabaran Masa Depan Bahasa Melayu (ATMA 2012), and Bridging the Past: A Festschrift Honoring Prof Dr Muhammad Haji Salleh, KL: DBP (forthcoming).

Dr D. Kyle Latinis, Visiting Fellow at the NSC, currently researches the Historical Ecology of Southeast Asia—an approach which combines ethnographic, historic and archaeological data to examine long term human-environment trends, inclusive of internal and external socio-economic factors and resource exploitation. He will also assist with projects and field training in Mainland Southeast Asia, having over 20 years of experience in Cambodia.

Dr Latinis earned a PhD at the National University of Singapore, Department of Southeast Asian Studies (2008) and a PhD in Ecological Anthropology at the University of Hawaii, Department of Anthropology (1999). Recently, he was a Director and Senior Social Scientist with the US Department of Defense (2011–2014; including 18 months of applied research in Afghanistan), and Dean of Graduate Studies and Social Sciences at the University of Cambodia (2009–2011). Previous fieldwork and research throughout the 1990s and early 2000s focused on east Indonesia (Maluku, Papua Barat, Sulawesi) and proximate areas in the Pacific. He has also participated in several Singapore heritage projects since 1995 where he first worked with Dr John Miksic at the Fort Canning and Empress Place archaeological sites. His most recent (2014) research publication is: “The Social and Ecological Trajectory of Prehistoric Cambodian Earthworks” Asian Perspectives, 52(2):327–346.

Joyce Zaide, Communications Officer at the Centre, received her Masters Degree in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore. She manages NSC’s website and social media platforms. Joyce is Co-editor of the NSC Working Paper Series and also assists in conceptualising publicity materials. She has done research on Asian women’s identities and representations on the Internet. Her research interests are media, communication, gender, migration and heritage.