With a grant from the Luce Initiative on Southeast Asia (LuceSEA) Competition, Cornell University will act as host for the Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia Studies (GETSEA) consortium. Collaborating centers will explore and develop new ways to share resources and expertise, and enable distance learning, mentoring, and networking for graduate students across institutions.

“The resources are so scarce, we can’t see ourselves as competitors…We don’t think institutions can continue to be siloed the way they have been.”

Cornell’s Southeast Asia Program (SEAP) has received a $275,000 Luce Foundation award to strengthen graduate education in Southeast Asian studies by developing new mechanisms for sharing expertise and resources among major Southeast Asia centers across the United States.

The award, over four years, will allow Cornell and other federally funded National Resource Centers specializing in Southeast Asia to pool their resources and collaborate across institutional divides as the Graduate Education and Training in Southeast Asia Studies (GETSEA) consortium.

With Cornell as the institutional host, the initiative will provide inventive approaches and new opportunities such as mini-courses and graduate seminars via distance learning. It also will facilitate scholarly networks, mentoring and advising, and offer venues for shared language instruction.

The consortium will encourage and foster collaborative work and will support the next generation of Ph.D.s in international studies, preparing for careers in academia, diplomacy and civil service, and nongovernmental organizations.

Consortium members also include the National Resource Centers on Southeast Asia at the University of Michigan; Northern Illinois University; the University of Hawaii, Manoa; the University of Washington; the University of Wisconsin, Madison; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the University of California, Berkeley.

Read the full article