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SSEAC Webinar Series - Heritage and the Arts
Join us on Thursdays in 2021 for a special webinar series dedicated to Southeast Asia.
In August/September, we're proud to showcase some of our best and brightest scholars' research expertise with a focus on Heritage and the Arts.
The Precarious Past: Historical Practices in Premodern Java
Join Dr Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan as he steps back into the past to explore how the premodern Javanese recorded history, and how their historical practices have influenced the development of Javanese historiography.
Distance and Closeness: A Creative Writer and Teacher’s ‘Autoethnographic’ Adventures in Malaysia
Join award-winning writer Dr Beth Yahp as she reflects on the challenges of distance and closeness in storytelling.
Expanding “Women’s Archive”: Womanifesto, Dr Melani and a Discourse on Hospitality in Southeast Asian Art History
Join Dr Yvonne Low for an insight into new feminist research on the archives of Womanifesto and Dr Melani Setiawan.
The Power and Privilege of Blue-and-white in 14th-century Vietnam and the Malay Peninsula
Delve into the past and learn all about the 14th century trade of precious ceramics from Asia with Dr Alex Burchmore.
About the speakers
Dr Alex Burchmore is an art historian specialising in the study of Chinese and Southeast Asian art of the past and present, with a particular focus on ceramics, trade and exchange, and the interweaving of personal and material identities. Alex received his PhD from the Australian National University in 2019 and joined the University of Sydney’s Museum and Heritage Studies department in 2021. His doctoral dissertation traced the extent to which artists in China have used porcelain to shape their personal, historical, and cultural identities, from the 1990s to the present. His most recent publications include a study of the ‘material Chineseness’ of ink and porcelain in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Art, and a chapter dedicated to the ‘fugitive luxury’ of contemporary Chinese ceramics in 'The Allure of Matter: Materiality Across Chinese Art', forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Dr Yvonne Low teaches and researches on modern and contemporary Asian Art (with specialism in Singapore and Indonesia). Her research interests include colonial histories, cultural politics, women artists, global feminisms, and digital methods. Yvonne has published over 40 essays in books, journals and catalogues, and is on the editorial committee of Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia. She holds degrees from the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. She has taught at Nanyang Technological University, School of Art Design and Media, the University of New South Wales, Faculty of the Built Environment. She is currently a Lecturer in Asian Art at the University of Sydney’s Power Institute where she co-convened the inaugural 2017 Gender in Southeast Asian art histories symposium.
Dr Wayan Jarrah Sastrawan is a postdoctoral research fellow at the École française d’Extrême-Orient (Paris), and a research affiliate at the University of Sydney. He is a historian specialising in the premodern history of Indonesia. He is especially interested in using indigenous Southeast Asian sources to rethink how history is practised. Jarrah has written on premodern Southeast Asian history in leading history and area studies journals, as well as giving public and academic talks on his research. His current research project, funded by the European Research Council's Synergy Grant DHARMA, focusses on the development of social institutions and state formation in eighth- to tenth-century Java.
Originally from Malaysia, Beth Yahp is an award-winning author of fiction and non-fiction, whose work has been published in Australia and internationally. Her novel The Crocodile Fury was translated into several languages and her libretto, Moon Spirit Feasting, for composer Liza Lim, won the APRA Award for Best Classical Composition in 2003. Beth was the presenter of ‘Elsewhere’, a program for travellers on ABC Radio National (2010-2011). Her latest publication is a collection of short stories, The Red Pearl and Other Stories (Vagabond Press, 2017). Her travel memoir Eat First, Talk Later (Penguin Random House, 2015) was shortlisted for the 2018 Adelaide Festival Award for Literature (Non-Fiction). Beth teaches Creative Writing at the University of Sydney.