Fall 2014 seminar: Ph.D. candidate, Asian literature, religion, and culture
Chairat Polmuk received his B.A. (with honors) and M.A. in Thai literature from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand. In 2013, he completed his M.A. in southeast asian studies from Cornell University, writing a thesis on Lao literary modernity and its political implications in the wake of cultural nationalism and anticolonial movements in Southeast Asia. He is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of Asian Literature, Religion, and Culture at Cornell with special interests in critical ethnic studies, affect theory, and film studies. As a Mellon Fellow, he proposes to explore emergent counterpublic aesthetics in contemporary Thailand in relation to the country's current political impasse. The project aims to unravel how Thailand's political conflicts during the past decade have paradoxically constituted "the intimate public sphere" in which marginalized subjects are bound to the state through narratives of care, reparation, and, more recently, happiness, and how artists and activists alike have critically responded to such affective politics.