Digital Enclosure and Colonial Technology Travel: Safe Cities from Xinjiang to Kuala Lumpur

Michael Laffan

Paula Chow Professor of International and Regional Studies; Professor of History

Princeton University

Michael Laffan's research interests lie in the history of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean region. He earned his B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995), and his Ph.D. (2001) in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney. He came to Princeton in 2005 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. In his first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (Routledge, 2003), he argued that Islam played a central and largely unacknowledged role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, which historians have tended to associate mainly with a secular, Dutch-educated elite. His second book, The Makings of Indonesian Islam (Princeton, 2011), looked at the results of an engagement between Islamic reformers with intellectual links to Cairo and influential colonial scholars, arguing that they set the parameters for the ways in which Islam has been, and still is, imagined in specific ways in both Southeast Asia and the Academy. His newest book, Under Empire (Columbia, 2022), looks at two centuries of interactions between Muslim subjects of empires and nation states across the Indian Ocean. He has also edited collections of essays (one with Gyan Prakash and Nikhil Menon) on ideas of belonging around the Bay of Bengal and the postcolonial moment in South and Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2016 and 2017).  

Darren Byler

Assistant Professor of International Studies

Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, British Columbia

Byler is assistant professor of International Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia. He is the author of an award-winning ethnography "Terror Capitalism: Uyghur Dispossession and Masculinity in a Chinese City" and a narrative-driven book titled "In the Camps: China's High-Tech Penal Colony." His current research and teaching is focused on infrastructure development and global China.

Angela Ke Li

Fung Global Fellow 2023-24

Princeton University

Angela Ke Li is an assistant professor at the National University of Singapore. She is a scholar of information and communication technologies, especially interested in digital economies and the mutual shaping of technology and society. She earned her Ph.D. from the Institute of Communication Research at the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign, where her dissertation was supported by a fellowship from the Chiang Ching-Kuo Foundation. As Fung Global Fellow, she will work on her dissertation-turned-manuscript, tentatively entitled "Digital Disruption: Ride-hailing and the Failures of Innovation," which focuses on China's ride-hailing giant Didi Chuxing.