Bio

Bryce Beemer has a PhD in Southeast Asian History from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa where he also studied World History and comparative slavery. He was recently the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative World History at Colby College, and worked as an editor for TRaNS, a journal devoted to transnational research on the Southeast Asia region. His research is on the transcultural ramifications of slave gathering warfare in Southeast Asia and Northeast India with a special focus on enslaved artisans, religious rituals, artistic production, and processes of creolization and cultural exchange. The Fulbright-Hays (DDRA) and a Watumull Foundation grant for research in South Asia funded his research which was conducted in three countries—Thailand, Burma, and Manipur (India)—over a two-year period.  His recent publication “Southeast Asian Slavery and Slave-Gathering Warfare as a Vector for Cultural Transmission: The Case of Burma and Thailand” (published in the Historian) received several academic awards for its innovative research. Transforming his research into a dissertation was benefited by his selection for the AAS/SSRC Dissertation Workshop on “Rewriting Asian History: Nationalism, Identity and the Politics of the Past.” Bryce’s dissertation went on to win the 2014 Dissertation Prize awarded by the World History Association (WHA).