TCAS Lecture: Rachel Harrison

Speaker: Rachel Harrison
Date and time: Tuesday, 10 February 2026, 1pm-1.50pm
Venue: TRiSS seminar room, 6th floor, Arts Building

For much of my career, since working on The Ambiguous Allure of the West: Traces of the Colonial in Siam/Thailand (2010), I have focussed on how best to draw the study of Thai culture into dialogue with the world beyond its national borders. The linchpin of modern Thai national identity, as defined by the State, draws on a constructed characteristic of uniqueness – that Siam/Thailand was the only country in the region to have escaped colonial rule by the West. As a result of this self-styled politico-cultural superiority, Siam/Thailand is rendered incomparable to its neighbours. But in this, Thai Studies finds itself at an intellectual disadvantage: as Benedict Anderson provocatively encapsulates in his rhetorical question posed in 1978 on the state of Thai Studies: ““What damn good is this country—you can’t compare it with anything!” The ability to make comparisons between Thailand and other countries, between Thai culture and other cultures, is central, in my view, to making the study of Thailand resonate in the outside world. It is central to the intellectual agenda of making Thailand matter in the wider scheme of South East Asian studies, and of global academia. To this I should add, by way of emphasis, that I do not use the term ‘global academia’ as shorthand for ‘Western academia’. The study of Thai culture has the capacity to generate its own inter-Asian theoretical models beyond those of European thought,

This lecture explores how and why the study of Thai culture matters as a point of comparison with other cultures. To achieve this, I take as my primary cultural texts, the work of Thai short story writer, Sidaoruang; the horror film genre, with particular reference to Nang Nak; and the shaping of Thai national identity through photography in the early twentieth century.

Rachel Harrison is Professor of Thai Cultural Studies and Head of the Doctoral School at SOAS University of London. She has published widely on modern literature and cinema, gender, sexuality, and popular culture in Thailand, in addition to a focus on the cultural effects of Siam/Thailand’s post-coloniality in relation to the West. She is currently working on an interdisciplinary research project bringing on culture, well-being, and public health to dialogue with medical practice in Northeast Thailand. Her teaching focuses on the generation of cultural studies theory from the perspective of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. She is also the editor of the quarterly journal South East Asia Research.

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