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Student Testimonials

Christina Geisse

The Asian Studies Program was incredible because most professors were undertaking their own research, passionate about their subject of study, and enthusiastic about sharing their knowledge with students. It felt fresh and profound at the same time. Inspiring! 

Christina Geisse
Kim Sluchansky

I was able to delve deep and focus on the areas of Asian Studies that truly interested me, and therefore gained a much more thorough and developed understanding of my fields of interest, which are applicable to my current career path. Also, the professors are extremely helpful and want their students to succeed. They were very supportive both while I was at UH and after I graduated.

New Book: Women Warriors in Southeast Asia

Book cover. In red thin rectangle in middle with white text that reads "Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia". Center has white rectangle with all black capital text with book title "Women Warriors in Southeast Asia" and editors names "Vina Lanzona and Frederik Rettig" in red. Background is greenish-blue with red-orange colored splotches. Bottom right corner has Routledge logo in red and white.

Book Publication

The Asian Studies Program is proud to announce the publication of Women Warriors in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2020), edited by former Director of the Center for Philippine Studies, Vina Lanzona (Associate Professor of History, UH Manoa), and Frederik Rettig, with a concluding chapter by Barbara Andaya (Professor of Asian Studies, UH Manoa).

The book is part of the series Routledge Studies in the Modern History of Asia.

From Routledge:

“This book brings together a wide range of case studies to explore the experiences and significance of women warriors in Southeast Asian history from ancient to contemporary times.

Using a number of sources, including royal chronicles, diaries, memoirs and interviews, the book discusses why women warriors were active in a domain traditionally preserved for men, and how they arguably transgressed peacetime gender boundaries as agents of violence. From multidisciplinary perspectives, the chapters assess what drove women to take on a variety of roles, namely palace guards, guerrillas and war leaders, and to what extent their experiences were different to those of men. The reader is taken on an almost 1,500-year long journey through a crossroads region well-known for the diversity of its peoples and cultures, but also their ability to creatively graft foreign ideas onto existing ones. The book also explores the re-integration of women into post-conflict Southeast Asian societies, including the impact (or lack thereof) of newly established international norms, and the frequent turn towards pre-conflict gender roles in these societies.

Written by an international team of scholars, this book will be of interest to academics working on Southeast Asian Studies, Gender Studies, low-intensity conflicts and revolutions, and War, Conflict, and Peace Studies.”

Among the contributions are Lanzona and Rettig’s introduction, and Lanzona’s chapter “Love and sex in times of war and revolution: women warriors in Vietnam and the Philippines.”

Barbara Andaya, Professor of Asian Studies, provided the concluding chapter, “Rethinking the historical place of ‘warrior women’ in Southeast Asia.”

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