Tom Pepinsky
1,034 FOLLOWERS
I teach political science at Cornell, and work on political economy, Islam, Southeast Asia, and methods. I study the interaction of political and economic systems, mostly in emerging market economies.
Tom Pepinsky
2M ago
Alternate Title: “Rochester and Murdoch in Washington, DC“
The Supreme Court is prepared to hear arguments about whether President Trump may be disqualified from 2024 presidential election in several U.S. states just because he tried to overthrow the democratically elected government of the United States through an armed insurrection on January 6, 2021. On one hand, the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits anyone who has engaged in insurrection from holding office:
No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
3M ago
As editor of the Journal of East Asian Studies, I am very pleased to announce an exciting change to JEAS’s publication model. In collaboration with Cambridge University Press and with the full support of the East Asia Institute, starting in 2025 JEAS will transition to a fully Open Access publication model. This means that starting next year, every new article published by JEAS will be freely available to any reader, anywhere in the world, at no cost. Even more importantly, none of the costs of this transition to full Open Access will be borne directly by our authors.
This is a major milestone ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
4M ago
This is the sixth in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.
Previous reviews:
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (5): Thu ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
5M ago
This is the fifth in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.
Previous reviews:
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (3): Ayu Utami, Saman
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (4): Tash Aw, We, The Survivors
Thuận, Chinatown
When you pick up this slim ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
6M ago
This is the third in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.
Previous review:
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (2): Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
Ayu Utami, Saman
Back in graduate school, I wrote a dissertation about the political economy of regime change in Indonesia and Malaysia. I was in college when the Soeharto regime fell and whe ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
7M ago
This is the second in a series of short reviews on modern Southeast Asian fiction. There will be spoilers. As always I’m pleased to have had the chance to develop these thoughts as part of a course, so credit is due to my student as well.
Previous review:
Short Reviews of Modern SEA Fiction (1): Rachel Heng, The Great Reclamation
Gina Apostol, Insurrecto
This is one of those books that you read about before you read. Gina Apostol is a giant of modern Philippine literature, and Insurrecto is a heck of a book.
The early chapters, much like the reviews, hinted at just how many layers of m ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
7M ago
According to WordPress, which hosts tompepinsky.com, this is my 1000th blog post on a blog that has been maintained—with gaps here and there, across a couple different platforms—since August 2004. It’s hard to imagine that I have had 1000 things to say over the past 19 years, but you can check the archives for the evidence. It’s all there.
When I reach my 20 year anniversary of blogging about 11 months from now, I’ll write a bit more about how academic blogging has changed over the course of my professional career. There is also something very personal and special about re-reading some of my e ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
7M ago
I have the great fortune to lead a course in modern Southeast Asian Fiction in English this semester. This means that I get to read and critically evaluate a baker’s dozen of recent Southeast Asia-themed books, and also some classics. It’s a motley bunch, but it’s tremendous fun and I have learned a lot already.
What’s more, this is a special opportunity to think about the intersection of political science, Southeast Asian studies, and literary fiction. I’ll use this space to write short reviews of these books from the perspective of an eager reader, someone who is not a literary critic but wh ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
9M ago
Inger Newburn recently shared a critical essay on the relationship between social media and academia in the current moment. Her points are important. Anyone who believes that the roughly decade-old consensus on public engagement and academic career building via social media still holds true ought to read it carefully.
I have been thinking about how recent changes to the social media landscape have affected even passive users of academic social media. Because I am a political scientist, I notice the effects in particular on political science academia; as I will note below, I don’t think that th ..read more
Tom Pepinsky
10M ago
I am writing a book about Malaysia’s ethnic order*, using the Malay world as a way to think more generally about social categories like ethnicity and how to conceptualize them. This book project combines all of my interests: maritime Southeast Asia, political economy, colonial history (Portuguese, Dutch, English, and Japanese), language, analytic philosophy, social ontology, diaspora studies, criticizing things for not really making sense, trying to subvert paradigms, making custom maps, and statistics. The last of these is the subject of this post.
One of the tasks of my book is to demonstrat ..read more