Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies

Welcome to SSEAS

We offer training in 14 languages, and undergraduate and graduate degree programs in the histories, religions, cultures and textual traditions of a third of the world’s population. Our faculty specializes in all periods from the classical to the modern, in the fields of literature, history, and religious studies, and conducts research in India, Pakistan, Tibet, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

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Recent News

The South and Southeast Asian Library Celebrates its 50th Anniversary

UC Berkeley’s South and Southeast Asia Library celebrates its 50th anniversary with a vibrant exhibit.

Dr. Cheryl Yin, a linguistic anthropologist working on Cambodia, joins UC Berkeley as a postdoctoral fellow

Cheryl Yin is joining the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies as a 2021-2022 UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow. Dr. Yin recently received her Ph.D. in Linguistic Anthropology from the University of Michigan, with a dissertation on Khmer honorifics. She is from Long Beach, California…

UC Berkeley Assistant Professor position in Sanskrit Studies

The Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley seeks to appoint an Assistant Professor in Sanskrit Studies, tenure track. Diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging are core values of the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies. We believe that…

Completed PhDs

Ryan Damron, 2021

Deyadharma — A Gift of the Dharma: The Life and Works of Vanaratna

Padma Maitland, 2021

The Great Wander: Buddhism, Travel, and the Hindi World

Sean Kerr, 2021

The Literary Abhidhamma Text: Anuruddha’s Manual of Defining Mind and Matter (Namarupapariccheda) and the Production of Pali Commentarial Literature in South India

Megan Hewitt, 2021

Ilmu Lan Laku: The Arts of Praxis in Indonesian Transformative Movements

Janet Um, 2021

Urban Space and the Poetics of Prose: The Works of Daṇḍin in Early-Medieval India

Lisa Brooks, 2021

Translating Touch in Ayurveda: Medicine Sense and Subjectivity in Early South Asia and Contemporary Kerala

Kat Gutierrez
2020
The Region of Imperial Strategy: Regino Garcia, Sebastián Vidal, Mary Clemens and the Consolidation International Botany in the Philippines, 1858-1936

Yusmarni Djalius
2019
Minangkabau Intellectuals and Radical Nationalism in British Malaya

Rebecca Whitington
2019
Tug-of-ear: The Play of Dialect in Modern Bengali and Tamil Literature

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