KEYNOTE SPEAKER
Keynote Speaker
Professor Elora Shehabuddin
Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and Global Studies. She is the author of Sisters in the Mirror: A History of Muslim Women and the Global Politics of Feminism (University of California Press, 2021), Reshaping the Holy: Democracy, Development, and Muslim Women in Bangladesh (Columbia University Press, 2008), and Empowering Rural Women: The Impact of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh (Grameen Bank, 1992). She has published articles in Meridians, Signs, Journal of Women's History, History of the Present, Economic & Political Weekly, Modern Asian Studies, Südasien-Chronik [South Asia Chronicle], Journal of Bangladesh Studies, and Asian Survey, as well as chapters in numerous edited volumes. She was a guest co-editor of a special issue of Feminist Economics on “Gender and Economics in Muslim Communities.” She currently serves on the editorial boards of Journal of Bangladesh Studies and a new Cambridge University Press book series titled "Muslim South Asia." She is Associate Editor (Central and South Asia) of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures.
Professor Shehabuddin has received several fellowships, including from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, the American Association of University Women, the Social Science Research Council, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the U.S. Institute of Peace. She has been selected as a Research Associate in the Women’s Studies in Religion Program at the Divinity School at Harvard University and as a Carnegie Scholar. Her doctoral dissertation was awarded the American Political Science Association’s Aaron Wildavsky Dissertation Award for best dissertation in Religion and Politics. She was Professor of Transnational Asian Studies and Core Faculty in the Center for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality at Rice University prior to moving to Berkeley in 2022. She was Assistant Professor of Women's Studies and Political Science at UC Irvine in 1999–2001. She received her A.B. in Social Studies from Harvard University and Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton.
Reid Lecturer
Dr Koji Hirata
Dr Koji Hirata is a Senior Research Fellow (ARC DECRA Fellow) in History at
Monash University. He earned his Ph.D. in history at Stanford University.
Before joining Monash, he was a Research Fellow (JRF) at Emmanuel College,
University of Cambridge. His research focuses on modern China, Japan, and
Russia/Soviet Union with broader implications for the global history of
capitalism and socialism. He is currently working on a ARC-funded book project about Mao-era China’s foreign economic relations.
As the winner of the 2025 Reid Prize from the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Dr Hirata will deliver the Reid Lecture at the conference in 2026. The title of Dr Hirata's talk is Making Mao's Steelworks: Rethinking China's Socialist Planned Economy from a Global Perspective.
Women in Asia Lecture
Dr Anak Agung Istri Diah Tricesaria
Anak Agung Istri Diah Tricesaria (or Diah) is an Herb Feith Scholar at the Monash Herb Feith Indonesian Engagement Centre. She recently received her PhD in anthropology from Monash University, with a research focus on refugee women’s experiences of navigating legal exclusion, informality, and everyday bordering practices with particular attention to class, social capital and intersectional inequalities in the context of a Refugee Convention non-signatory country.
Beyond academia, Diah has worked with humanitarian organisations such as Jesuit Refugee Services Indonesia and HOST International, and also closely with refugee-led (The Sisterhood) and civil society organisations (Perkumpulan SUAKA Indonesia), bridging research, advocacy and policy conversations on refugee protection.