Refine Your Research Proposal and Publications for Academic Success

We are pleased to announce a writing workshop designed for PhD candidates and early-career scholars in the humanities and social sciences focused on any area of Asia. This workshop allows participants to develop their English writing skills and refine various scholarly projects, including PhD proposals, journal articles, edited volume contributions, and book manuscripts.

Participants will engage with their peers and experienced mentors, receive constructive feedback, and enhance their writing techniques. The workshop will cover essential aspects of academic writing, such as structuring arguments, clarity of expression, and adherence to publication standards. Additionally, it will address the unique challenges faced by scholars working on Asia-related topics, offering tailored advice and strategies for successful publication. We will limit the workshop to 10 participants, with two faculty mentors, to allow for extended discussion of each project. We expect participants to comment on each other’s projects and respond to feedback on their own.

We invite submissions of abstracts for potential workshop presentations. Abstracts should outline the participant’s current research project, its significance, and the specific writing challenges they wish to address during the workshop. We expect selected participants to circulate drafts of their work in advance. Doing so will facilitate personalized feedback and guidance to advance their writing projects toward publication.

Shabbir Ahsen is Associate Professor at the Department of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Pakistan. Before joining LUMS, Shabbir taught at the Department of Philosophy, University of Karachi from August 1993 to Feb 2004 as permanent faculty member. At LUMS, since 2004, Shabbir has developed and taught courses on ‘Logic and Critical Reasoning’, ‘Formal Logic’, ‘Analytic Philosophy’, ‘Philosophy of Science’ and ‘Continental Rationalism’. He is presently engaged in developing a course on ‘Popper and Feyerabend’. Shabbir is a member of Pakistan Philosophical Congress (PPC). He was appointed as the president of Logic and Metaphysics section of PPC in 2000 and was also a member of its Executive Council 2002-2005.

Michitake Aso is a global environmental historian whose research has focused on Vietnamese and French agriculture, medicine, and health in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His current book project is on a history of medicine in North and South Vietnam during the Cold War. In 2018, he published Rubber and the Making of Vietnam (UNC Press) which won two book prizes: the Henry A. Wallace Award of the Agricultural History Society and the Charles A. Weyerhaeuser Award of the Forest History Society. He has also published four book chapters, participated in an NEH-funded digital humanities project, and authored articles in Modern Asian Studies, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and Science, Technology, and Society. He has held fellowships at the National University of Singapore, the University at Texas, Austin, and most recently the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University. He regularly teaches courses on environmental, medical, Vietnamese, and world history at the University of Albany. He is currently the Chair of the AAS Southeast Asia Council.

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies, Equity Advisor in Gender & Women’s Studies, Director, Global Studies Program, and Director, Subir and Malini Chowdhury Center for Bangladesh Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She was Professor of Transnational Asian Studies and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University prior to moving to Berkeley in 2022. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University. She is currently the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Vice-President.

Leang Un is dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) in Cambodia. His research interests and publications cover issues such as comparative education, education policy and the contribution of education to the development after the post-conflict period with a recent shift towards social sciences and humanities. He graduated in Social and Behavioral Science from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He was a deputy director for the Department of Higher Education, MoEYS, and chief of the Innovative and Development Grants of HEQCIP, funded by the World Bank, and a deputy director general of the Directorate General of Policy and Planning, MoEYS, between 2012 and 2016. He used to be a research fellow and visiting scholar at the Makerere University (Uganda) in 2009, Northern Illinois University (USA) in 2011 and a senior research fellow at the Center for Khmer Studies in 2014.