Profiles of Keynote and Plenary Speakers
Keynote Speaker
John Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology in Arts and Sciences, at Washington University in St. Louis
John Bowen is an anthropologist whose research explores the broad social transformations now taking place in the world-wide Muslim community, giving special emphasis to Muslim life in Indonesia. His research focuses on the role of cultural forms such as religious practices, aesthetic genres, and legal discourse in processes of social change. In most of his work he has looked outward from a long-term research site in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra,to the broader transformations taking place in the Indonesian nation and elsewhere around the globe. Through ground-breaking fieldwork beginning in 1978, Bowen has traced the intricacies of cultural and social shifts in the Gayo people’s oral traditions, Islamic practice and legal systems. Bowen’s fieldwork represents the first anthropological study of the Gayo people. His research documents the innovative reshaping of their oral histories, village maxims, oral poetic competitions and ritual speaking, which is used to settle disputes or mark major village events such as marriages. Through these adapted cultural forms, the Gayo have maintained a strong sense of identity and incorporated issues of public debate. The author of six books, he is a member of a number of national panels and editorial boards. Along with his anthropology appointment, Bowen also chairs the Committee on Social Thought and Analysis, a multidisciplinary program in the social sciences.
Keynote Speaker
Anthony Reid, Emeritus Professor of History at Australian National University
Anthony Reid is a historian of Aceh and Southeast Asia. After accepting his initial position teaching Southeast Asian History at the University of Malaya in Kuala Lumpur from 1965-70, he was a member of ANU’s former Department of Pacific & Asian History from 1970-1999. In 1999 he was appointed Founding Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA, Los Angeles, and in 2001 became the Founding Director of the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. After retiring in Canberra in 2009, he accepted visiting positions at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University from 2009-10 and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2012-13.He was honoured with the Fukuoka Prize for Asian Culture (Academic) in 2002 and the Life Achievement Award of the Association of Asian Studies in 2011. He has been a member of the Australian Academy of Humanities since 1987 and the British Academy since 2008.
Keynote Speaker
Barbara Leigh, Adjunct Professor of Arts Education at University of Technology Sydney
Dr Barbara Leigh’s research interests lie in the sociology of education in Indonesia. This involves an examination of social change in education systems from the macro level of funding, political control and organization to the micro level of interactions within the classroom, curricula design, textbooks and pedagogy. She is also interested in the material culture of Southeast Asia and its relation to national identity formation, centre-periphery relations and global industrial transformations. She has published in both these fields. She is a member of the Asian Studies Association of Australia and a member of the Textile Group of the Asian Arts Society of Australia.
Plenary Speaker
Margaret J Kartomi AM FAHA Dr Phil, Professor of Music, Sir Zelman Cowen School of Music, Monash University
Margaret Kartomi is an ethnomusicologist who specialises on the music-cultures of Sumatra and other parts of Indonesia and Southeast Asia, in particular the relationships between the music, dance, ritual, and religion as well as issues of culture contact, social class, gender, music analysis and organology. She has published widely on the music-cultures of Aceh, including in her most recent book, Musical Journeys in Sumatra (University of Illinois Press, 2012). Her current field research focuses on the music-cultures of the Riau Archipelago and Lampung Provinces of Sumatra. She is the Founding Director of the Music Archive of Monash University (commencing in 1975) which contains her field recordings and other data collected from 1969 to the present. Elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities in 1989 and made a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) for services to ethnomusicology in 1991, she was awarded the Centenary Medal by the Federal Government of Australia for service to Australian society and the humanities in 2003. She was elected a Corresponding Member of the American Musicological Society in 2004, and received an Order from the government of Lampung for her Sumatra research in 2011. She is also a Council member of the Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), was the program convenor for the SEM conference in Columbus, Ohio in 2007, and the convenor of two Symposia of the International Musicological Society in Melbourne in 1988 and 2004.