Center for Southeast Asia Studies

The Center for Southeast Asia Studies is one of the oldest and most prominent academic centers concerned with Southeast Asian Studies in the U.S., having been established at UC Berkeley in 1960. As an Organized Research Unit, CSEAS functions as an administrative base for faculty research, for campus lecture and film series, for campus visitors and researchers from Southeast Asia, and for public outreach and international conferences. An advisory committee composed of UC Berkeley faculty members with research interests in Southeast Asia supervises the Center. There are currently seven ladder-rank faculty at Berkeley affiliated with CSEAS as core faculty.

Since 2000, the Center has also been a U.S. Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center for Southeast Asia in consortium with the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA. As a joint center, UCLA and UC Berkeley form one of only seven Title VI National Resource Centers for Southeast Asia in the U.S., and the only such center in California.

The UC Berkeley-UCLA consortium helps students and faculty at each campus collaborate on particular programs (conferences, workshops, and speaker series), furthers the development of campus resources devoted to the field (in the area of library acquisitions, e.g.) and promotes improvements in the quality and accessibility of Southeast Asian language instruction.

In addition to its long-standing programs promoting Southeast Asian Studies to the academic community and the general public, CSEAS provides administrative support for the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, an academic journal launched in 2006 by the University of California Press that publishes new research about Vietnamese history, politics, culture and society. Management of the journal is a collaborative responsibility undertaken by a team of Vietnam Studies faculty primarily from the University of California system.