Meet Dr. Gillian Bogart, Our Newest Asian Studies Faculty and CSEAS Affiliate

Aloha and welcome to Dr. Gillian Bogart, our newest Asian Studies faculty member and CSEAS affiliate. She joined UH Mānoa in Fall 2025. Read her story here:

Faculty Spotlight: Dr. Gillian Bogart

• Assistant Professor of Asian Studies, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
• Affiliate Faculty, Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS)
• Affiliate member, Initiative for Asian American and Pacific Islander Voices in Environmental Humanities and Environmental Justice

Where she’s from

Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Dr. Bogart most recently came to Hawaiʻi from Santa Cruz, California. She joined the UH Mānoa faculty in Fall 2025.

Areas & regional focus

Dr. Bogart teaches and researches the culture, politics, and more-than-human worlds of Southeast Asia. Trained in environmental anthropology, her regional work centers on Indonesia—with emphases in West Timor and Bali—and on the everyday lives that take shape at the water’s edge.

Research in brief

Broadly, her scholarship examines the entwined processes of social and environmental transformation, especially in interstitial places: coastal zones, muddy ecologies, and the jagged edges of the nation-state.
Her current book manuscript is an ethnography of shifting livelihoods and value regimes in West Timor, tracing how coast-dwelling fisherfolk and farmers navigate economic nationalist initiatives and contemporary modes of governance in Indonesia.

Active projects

Dr. Bogart is a co-author of a forthcoming book that rethinks maritime Southeast Asia through a landscape perspective of mud. Research for this project has been supported by LuceSEA funding as part of her work with the Center for Southeast Asian Coastal Interactions at UC Santa Cruz.

Selected works

• “Weedy invader genjer has a tangled political past in Indonesia” (Feral Atlas). Read the piece.
  
• “Coastlines in Motion: A Sedimentary Rethinking of Southeast Asia” (Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, forthcoming; co-authored).
  

Advising

She welcomes graduate students who focus on Southeast Asia or who work on politics and the environment, more-than-human livelihoods, marginality, gender dynamics, capitalism and ecology.

Service & community engagement

Dr. Bogart collaborates with fisher-foragers and an architect to study vernacular fishing infrastructures and the more-than-human relations they sustain along Indonesian coasts. An exhibition from this collaboration was mounted at the London Design Museum (Summer 2025). The team plans additional public exhibitions and workshops and welcomes partnerships with arts organizations in Indonesia.