Throughout the upcoming academic year, School of Architecture Associate Professor Lawrence Chua will embark on three international fellowships supporting the research and writing of his next single-authored scholarly monograph investigating the chronopolitics and temporal entanglements of modern architecture and the pre-modern built environment in Thailand, Laos and Cambodia.

Tentatively titled “Constructing Anachronism: karma, renaissance and rebirth in Southeast Asian architectural history,” the project builds on Chua’s previous book, Bangkok Utopia and traces the movements of Southeast Asia’s architectural and epigraphical fragments from the pre-colonial past into the present. The book argues that although architectural modernity is typically narrated as a new conception of time rooted in the present, modernism in the region was also oriented toward “medieval” and “classical” pasts.

“This argument necessitates an investigation into what these temporal categories, imported from European historiography in the 19th and 20th centuries, meant in the context of the Southeast Asian built environment and how the colonial deployment of the concept of ‘renaissance’ squared against local understandings of karma, rebirth and sovereignty,” says Chua.

Through a historical investigation of the construction of an anachronistic landscape in modern-day mainland Southeast Asia, Chua’s book seeks to understand the ways that various regimes disaggregated fragments of the historical past from their older social and cosmological contexts as they crossed over into the progressive clock- and calendar-time of modernity.

Chua will spend the summer and fall of 2023 on a Visiting Research Scholar Fellowship at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Kyoto University in Japan, one of the world’s foremost centers for Southeast Asian regional studies. Awarded to “productive scholars of high reputation—who work on comparative and regional issues from a multi-area perspective—to conduct research, write or pursue other scholarly interests in connection with their field of study.” The center is of particular importance to Chua’s project because it has the most extensive library of “cremation volumes” outside of Thailand. Initiated in the late 19th century, these commemorative books were given as gifts to guests at Thai funerals, and usually include a biography of the deceased as well as other literary materials.

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Lawrence Chua joined SAH in 2006. He was awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship to attend the Annual Conference in 2007, and a Travel Fellowship in 2011. He served as a speaker at the SAH 2016 Annual International Conference, and as a session chair at the SAH 2021 Virtual Conference. He has also served as a member of the JSAH Editorial Committee.