Shorenstein APARC
Stanford University
Encina Hall, Room E321
Stanford, CA 94305-6055

emmerson@stanford.edu
(650) 724-6403 (voice)
(650) 723-6530 (fax)

Research Interests
Southeast Asia; ASEAN; Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore; Islamism; the Muslim world; regionalism; democratization; U.S. foreign policy; and the sociology of scholarly knowledge

Donald Emmerson is director of the Southeast Asia Forum (SEAF) at the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center; a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies; and an affiliated scholar with the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies. He has taught courses on Southeast Asia in Stanford's International Relations and International Policy Studies Programs, in the Department of Political Science, and for the Bing Overseas Studies Program.

Recent publications by Emmerson include an edited book, Hard Choices: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia (November 2008), and these chapters and articles: "Critical Terms: Security, Democracy, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia," in Hard Choices (2008); "ASEAN's 'Black Swans,'" Journal of Democracy (July 2008); "Southeast Asia in Political Science: Terms of Enlistment," in Southeast Asia in Political Science: Theory, Region, and Qualitative Analysis (2008); "Challenging ASEAN: A ‘Topological' View," in Contemporary Southeast Asia (December 2007); "From State to Society? Democracy and Regionalism in Southeast Asia," in the Inclusive Regionalist (2007); "One Nation under God? History, Faith, and Identity in Indonesia," in Religion and Religiosity in the Philippines and Indonesia: Essays on State, Society, and Public Creeds (2006); "Shocks of Recognition: Leifer, Realism, and Regionalism in Southeast Asia," in Order and Security in Southeast Asia: Essays in Memory of Michael Leifer (2006); and "Garuda and Eagle: Do Birds of A (Democratic) Feather Fly Together?" the Indonesian Quarterly (2006). Earlier publications, authored or edited, span some dozen monographs and more than a hundred articles and chapters.

Emmerson serves on the editorial boards of Contemporary Southeast Asia, the Journal of Democracy, and the Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs. He is a member of the Board of Advisors, National Bureau of Asian Research, Seattle, WA; the Research Council, International Forum for Democratic Studies, Washington, DC; the Strategic Dialogue on New Power Dynamics in Southeast Asia, Stanley Foundation, Muscatine, IA; the U.S. Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia-Pacific, Pacific Forum/CSIS, Honolulu, HI; and the Working Group on Democratization, Global Expertise Reserve Program, U.S. State Department, Washington, D.C.

Since coming to Stanford in 1999, he has taken part in various working groups on U.S.-Asian relations including a SEAF-cosponsored National Commission on U.S.-Indonesian Relations. The Commission's report led to Congressional hearings and an executive-branch initiative to assist Indonesian education. Emmerson has also testified before Congress on Asian affairs on several occasions.

At Stanford in 2007-08, Emmerson sponsored a student-initiated course, "Taste of Thailand: An Introduction to Thai Culture and History," including lecturing on the politics of Thai identity. In Singapore in September 2006, he taught a Stanford undergraduate seminar on "Southeast Asia and the Singapore ‘Exception.'"

Emmerson's interviews on Southeast Asian topics have included, among other media, Al Jazeera, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC, Bloomberg News, Berita Harian [Malaysia], Business Week, the Chicago Tribune, the Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org), Dziennek [Daily News, Warsaw], the International Herald Tribune, National Public Radio, KQED [San Francisco], Nihon Keizai Shimbun [Tokyo], the New York Times, the South China Morning Post, the Straits Times, VietnamNet, the Voice of America, and the Washington Observer Weekly.

Frequently invited to speak at meetings and conferences, Emmerson's recent speaking engagements have included: Annual Meetings, American Political Science Association, Association for Asian Studies; ASEAN and Asia Forum, Singapore Institute of International Affairs; Asia Foundation/World Affairs Council (San Francisco); Conference on America, Indonesia, and Counter-Terrorism, Centre for Strategic and International Studies/University of British Columbia (Jakarta); Conference on New Leadership Trends in Southeast Asia, Stanley Foundation/Indonesia Council of World Affairs (Jakarta); East-West Center Washington (DC); Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies, Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (Singapore). He has also spoken at roundtables on U.S.-Asia relations hosted by the Asia Society (Hong Kong, New York) and the Institute for International Relations (Hanoi).

In 2008, Emmerson was invited to Jakarta to observe the centenary of National Awakening Day. In 2001, a lecture tour of Australia took him to nine campuses in that country. He helped monitor voting in Indonesia and East Timor for the National Democratic Institute and the Carter Center in 1999.

Places where Emmerson has held positions in residence include the Australian National University, the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton), the Monterey Institute of International Studies, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (where he won a campus-wide teaching award).

Emmerson has a PhD in political science from Yale and a BA in international affairs from Princeton. He is fluent in Indonesian, was fluent in French, and has lectured and written in both languages. He has lesser competence in Dutch, Javanese, and Russian. A former slam poet in English, he enjoys the spoken word. In 2008 he was featured under a nom de plume by the Not Yet Dead Poets Society in Redwood City, CA.

He and his wife Carolyn met in high school in Lebanon. They have two children. Emmerson was born in Tokyo, the son of U.S. Foreign Service Officer John K. Emmerson, who wrote the Japanese Thread among other books.