About Professor Weiss

Meredith Weiss joined the faculty of the Political Science department at the University at Albany in Fall 2008. Professor Weiss’s research is in the field of comparative politics, focusing on Southeast Asia, especially Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. Thematically, she explores processes and patterns of political development and mobilization, including such dimensions as nationalism and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, Islamism, and coalition-building in both civil society and electoral politics. Professor Weiss’s first book, Protest and Possibilities: Civil Society and Coalitions for Political Change in Malaysia (Stanford University Press, 2005) examines political mobilization and efforts at political change in 20th century Malaysia, and contrasts coalition-building and reform processes there and in Indonesia. Her current book, Crucible, Mirror, Sideshow? Universities and Students in Postcolonial Malaysia, situates student activism and its suppression as a part of postcolonial political development, focusing on Malaysia and Singapore from the late colonial period until the present. Her next major project will explore the intermeshing of feminist and “queer” discourses and identities in Southeast Asia. Professor Weiss is also co-editor (with Saliha Hassan) of Social Movements in Malaysia: From Moral Communities to NGOs (RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), which analyzes the development of civil society in Malaysia, focusing on several of the most important social movements there; as well as Political Violence in South and Southeast Asia (with Itty Abraham and Edward Newman), which explores the significance, nature, and roots of violent political contention in these two regions (United Nations University Press, forthcoming). A volume now in progress (co-edited with Edward Aspinall and Mark Thompson), provisionally entitled Vanguard in a Vacuum? Student Activism in Asia, compares campus-based movements across Northeast and Southeast Asia. In addition, Professor Weiss has published articles in Perspectives on Politics, Democratization, New Political Science, Journal of East Asian Studies, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, and other journals, in addition to numerous book chapters. 

Professor Weiss currently chairs the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) and is on the AAS Board of Directors. She is also Treasurer of the New Political Science section of the American Political Science Association (APSA) and is past chair of the APSA’s LGBT Caucus. She has testified for the House Committee on International Relations (Subcommittee on Asia and the Pacific), given briefings for the US Trade Representative and State Department, and served as a State Department lecturer in Malaysia. Professor Weiss came to the University at Albany after three years at the East-West Center in Washington, DC; prior to that, she was on the faculty at DePaul University. She has held visiting fellowships also at the University of Sydney, Universiti Malaya, Georgetown University, and the Australian National University, and has been the recipient of Fulbright, SSRC, and other grants. Professor Weiss received her PhD and MA degrees from Yale University.

Selected Publications

 

• Weiss, Meredith. “Intellectual Containment: The Muting of Students in Semidemocratic Southeast Asia”Critical Asian Studies 41: 4 (Dec. 2009), pp. 499—522.
• Weiss, Meredith. “Civil Society at the Gate? Edging toward a New Politics in Malaysia,” Asian Survey 49:5 (September/October 2009), pp. 741-58.
• Weiss, Meredith. “What a Little Democracy Can Do: Trajectories of Reform in Malaysia and Indonesia.” Democratization, 14:1 (February 2007), pp. 26-43.
• Weiss, Meredith. “Rejection as Freedom? HIV/AIDS Organizations and Identity.” Perspectives on Politics 4:4 (December 2006), pp. 671-8.
• Weiss, Meredith. “Who Sets Social Policy in Metropolis?: Economic Positioning and Social Reform in Singapore.” New Political Science 27:3 (September 2005), pp. 267-89.
  
• Weiss, Meredith. “The Changing Shape of Islamic Politics in Malaysia.” Journal of East Asian Studies 4:1 (January–April 2004), pp. 139-73.