Readings in Southeast Asian History

Since 1991, the Association for Asian Studies has offered a biennial award for a first work dealing with the geographical region of Southeast Asia. Named after the late Harry J. Benda, the pioneering Czech historian of the Japanese occupation of Java, the prize has long assigned value (and expectation) to emerging scholarship on the region. But while we shall see how it can be used as a sampling of how a field might be taking shape at a given time, it is also worth juxtaposing with other works within the list, what has since emerged, and how one might connect Southeast Asia to other spaces and concerns.