EuroSEAS Book Prize 2026

EuroSEAS will award two book prizes at the 14th EuroSEAS conference (1-3 September 2026) in Madrid, Spain. The winners will receive the book prize certificate and € 750.

The EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize 
The EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize for the best academic book on Southeast Asia published in the humanities – including archaeology, art history, history, literature, performing arts and religious studies.
 
The EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize
The EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize for the best academic book on Southeast Asia published in the social sciences – including anthropology, economics, law, politics and international relations, and sociology.
 
Eligibility
• Only books written in English carrying a 2024 or 2025 date will be eligible.
• The same book will not be considered for both prizes – please submit to the most applicable category. If in doubt about which category applies, please email euroseas@kitlv.nl.
• The prize committees will reserve the right to cross-refer as they find appropriate. Only single-authored or co-authored research monographs are eligible: no edited volumes or textbooks.
• Translations of literary works are not eligible.
• There are no residency or citizenship requirements for authors, and no location requirements for publishers.
• Nominations should be made by the publishers of the book. There is no limit to the number of books an individual publisher may nominate.
• The decisions of the judges shall be final.
 
Award ceremony
The winners will be announced during the conference on 2 September 2026 from 9.30 to 10.00 AM in the Assembly Hall of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The winners will receive the book prize certificate and € 750
 
Juries
The juries, who performed a monumental task, consisted of:
Humanities: Marie Aubrey Villarecan, Henk Schulte Nordholt, Anton Zakharov 
Social Sciences: Anne Yvonne Guillou, Reza Idria, Claudia Merli, Silvia Vignato
 
Shortlist
A shortlist of the six nominated books in each category can be found here:

Shortlist Humanities Book Prize 2026
The shortlist for the Humanities Book Prize (in alphabetical order):
• Kathryn Dyt, The nature of kingship; The weather-world in nineteenth century Vietnam, University of Hawai’i Press, 2025 
• Christina Firpo, Beauty and the nation; Women, culture, and the national image in interwar Vietnam, Columbia University Press, January 2026 
• Stephen Murphy, Buddhist landscapes; Art and archaeology of the Khorat Plateau, 7th to 11th centuries, NUS Press, 2024 
• Michel Picard, Kebalian; The dialogic construction of Balinese identity, NUS Press, 2024 
• Sven Trakulthun, Confronting Christianity; The protestant mission and the Buddhist reform movement in nineteenth-century Thailand, Hawai’i University Press, 2024 
• Dag Yngvesson, Archipelagic cinemas; Screening Southeast Asian modernity, University of California Press, 2025 

Kathryn Dyt, The nature of kingship
This book is a genuine pleasure to read. It moves fluidly between conceptual framing and vivid, specific imagery. The colonial angle is handled with real nuance, too. Rather than simply showing French dismissal of Vietnamese cosmology as superstition, it traces how local scholars reinterpreted comets as symbols of French modernity, revealing adaptation rather than replacement. The book sheds new light on the active role of the Nguyen dynasty – usually depicted as conservatives who lost contact with the changing times – in gathering data in order to make weather forecasts. The author’s own fieldwork, folk stories gathered from elderly villagers in Nghệ An, adds an almost literary layer. 
 
Christina Firpo, Beauty and the nation
This book deepens existing research on dress and modernity in Southeast Asia by focusing on how women with various social backgrounds manifested themselves as self-conscious agents challenging old Confucian codes of female conduct. Beauty and the nation treats women as the actual drivers of the story, not just backdrops to colonial or nationalist politics. Every fashion trend becomes a small act of self-definition, even as male critics on all sides tried to turn women’s bodies into symbols for the nation’s morality or progress. The book also does not avoid discussing the reputational and family fallout women faced for these choices. 
 
Stephen Murphy, Buddhist landscapes
Buddhist landscapes presents a fundamental breakthrough in our knowledge of multiple Buddhist polities on the Khorat Plateau between the 7th-11th centuries. The monograph traces several maṇḍala, or complex ‘circles of kings’ with a paramount ruler in the center. These Buddhist polities are known through beautiful art objects and archaeological sites. The book includes many color pictures of wonderful Buddha and Bodhisattva images. The sīma tradition of Buddhist art objects on boundary stones reveals distinct Khorat Plateau aesthetics and motifs which reveal a new art style in early mainland Southeast Asia. 
 
Michel Picard, Kebalian
This book makes a convincing case that Balinese Hinduism wasn’t some ancient thing the Dutch discovered and protected. Instead, it was actually built by the categories the Dutch brought in, splitting religion from custom in a way the Balinese had never done before.  The author provides a comprehensive analysis of the intellectual and institutional processes that constituted the making of contemporary Balinese religion, tradition, art and culture. It traces how outside (colonial and national forces) formulated new paradigms which forced Balinese intellectuals not only to redefine their own world according to new categories like ‘culture’, ‘art’, ‘religion’, ‘tradition’, but also to make sense of the differences between these.     
 
Sven Trakulthun, Confronting Christianity
This book is a fascinating history of the complex interaction between Protestant missionaries and reform-minded Buddhist intellectuals in nineteenth century Siam. Evangelical Christianity aimed to weaken Theravāda Buddhism in Siam. However, the debates between representatives of both sides ultimately stimulated the emergence of a Modernist Buddhist movement which strengthened Siamese Buddhism. Buddhist Modernism was inspired by Christian theology and Western rationalism. The new modernized Buddhist orthodoxy provided Siamese kings the moral foundations to oppose Western imperialist pressures. 
   
Dag Yngvesson, Archipelagic cinemas
A new and daring narrative about key themes in Southeast Asian cinema with an emphasis on Indonesia. Based on a deep knowledge of a broad spectrum of film material, and bringing in his own expertise as film maker, the author focuses on the arrival of modern Western film making in Southeast Asia which collided with many regional modernisms and a deeper cultural undercurrent revealing monstrous female spirits, ghost, as well as feminine superheroes.  Its gender analysis is substantive, and it traces a shift from female protagonists who must die to access supernatural power to ones who survive and gain agency through partnership with female spirits.  

Shortlist Social Sciences Book Prize 2026
The shortlist for the Social Sciences Book Prize (in alphabetical order):
• Maryann Bylander, The trade-offs of legal status; Safe migration, documentation, and debts in Southeast Asia, University of Hawai’i Press, 2024
• Justine Chambers, Pursuing morality; Buddhism and everyday ethics in Southeastern Myanmar, NUS Press, 2024
• Chua Beng Huat, Public subsidy, private accumulation; The political economy of Singapore’s public housing, NUS Press, 2024
• Colm A. Fox, Bonding, bridging, and bypassing; Understanding ethnic politics in diverse societies, Oxford University Press, 2024
• Jenny Hedström, Reproducing revolution; Women’s labor and the war in Kachinland, Cornell University Press, 2025
• Noah Theriault, A forest of dreams; Capitalism, conservations and indigeneous rigths in the Philippines. University of Hawai’i Press, 2025
 
Maryann Bylander, The trade-offs of legal status
This is a mature book grounded in long-term research and engagement with a shifting political and global landscape. The book is very well organised, based on detailed ethnographic and documentary research and written in crystal-clear language. The main argument concerns infrastructures of migration and their political weight considered from a bottom-up perspective. According to Bylander, the Thai-Cambodian case shows that, in a transnational economy, decoupling safety from legality and legality from freedom is fundamental to understanding the drives, desires and decisions of the migrant population. The author concludes that because legality is a socially produced condition, not a personal quality, in the case examined, “the spectacle of safe migration” and its powerful enforcers (including unaware supporting NGO and researchers) produces discrimination and risk. The book is methodologically sound and never indulges in anecdotal ethnography, although it relies on individual stories to make broader points that are also otherwise argued and documented. It is constantly aware of the scientific debate as well as of the contrasting policy-making efforts carried out in Southeast Asia over a 10-year period. The author nicely recalls her different positions in the field and advocates a reasoned, subject-related “patchwork ethnography”. This book reminds us that it is important to address migration from a localised yet world-aware perspective if we want to find a paradigm of analysis and, ultimately, national policies that respond to the existing social and symbolic configuration of both migrants and the residents of the nations they inhabit.
 
Justine Chambers, Pursuing morality
Based in Hpa-An, the capital of Karen State in Myanmar, between 2015 and 2019, Justine Chambers gradually came to understand that sīla (thila in Burmese), the Pali term for “morality” in Buddhist scriptures, is a central concept in the lives of the Plong, the autonym used by the local Karen community. Charismatic and competing moral authorities have placed Buddhist revivalism at the heart of Plong collective identity and community life in a context of violent conflict between the Myanmar military and the ethno-nationalist armedand governance organization , the Karen National Union. How do Plong people constitute themselves as moral subjects amid complex power dynamics in a region situated at the margins of a military state, where they live as a “people in between” inhabiting “lands in-between”? This question takes us through a range of social settings and groups: from a local big man whose “unclean wealth” is used to make religious offerings, to an esoteric Buddhist sect; from a group of young students dreaming about their future while struggling with their filial duties, to the success of the Burmese nationalist Ma Ba Tha movement and its moral construction of Muslims as threatening “others”. The fieldwork is extraordinarily rich and multifaceted, revealing a much less familiar dimension of the Plong community. The pursuit of morality appears to be shaped less by scriptural commentary and religious preaching than by people’s ambivalent, often unsatisfactory responses to the dilemmas of everyday life.
 
Chua Beng Huat, Public subsidy, private accumulation
The book delivers a powerful critical reinterpretation of Singapore’s celebrated housing success story. Chua Beng Huat convincingly details how a socialist-leaning social welfare scheme was transformed into a private financial asset that anchors both retirement security and the ruling party’s political legitimacy. Its analytical brilliance rests in exposing the closed financial loop connecting state land nationalization, the Housing & Development Board (where Chua Beng Huat served as director of the Social Research Unit at the Housing and Development Board in the mid-1980s before joining the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore), and compulsory savings from the Central Provident Fund, while crucially shining a light on invisibilized homelessness and structural exclusions. Chua’s arguments are particularly compelling. 
 
Colm A. Fox, Bonding, bridging, and bypassing
Fox offers an effortless and clear demonstration that masterful theoretical clarity and rigorous empirical execution are a matter of elegance. Fox introduces “ethnic appeal” as the emergent strategy used in electoral politics, in their historical transition from a more party-centric to a candidate-centric system. The study’s highly original design, the organization of the material, and the analysis offer the reader a unique insight into electoral politics in Indonesia and whether and how ethnicity is politicized. The book provides a set of concepts that are easy to grasp, yet compelling: group viability and party ideology dictate the specific choice between bonding, bridging, or bypassing appeals. The remarkable triangulation of statistical and qualitative methodology, which generated a dataset of a sizeable photographic archive (4,000 photographed campaign posters drawn from over 25,000 photographed), allow the execution of an imaginative coding system of both newspaper articles and electoral posters. This complex method allows Fox to directly analyze candidate appeals rather than relying on flawed vote-share proxies. Fox accomplishes a difficult and complex task, in that he identifies a vital problem, operationalizes its concepts, systematically tests its theoretical mechanism, and generates insights that resonate far beyond its regional context. The book is a superb example of combining rigorous scientific methods and literary flair, visual and schematic renditions, and we follow the elections as if we were reading a whodunit. 
 
Jenny Hedström, Reproducing revolution
Ethnographically gripping descriptions introduce the reader to the context and make us feel as if we were sharing the same views, experiences, and encounters. The opening lines of the preface set us on the path to the key contribution of Hedström’s book in explaining the “militarized social reproduction” and its gendered dimension, and the role of the domestic sphere and women’s labour in securing continuous resistance to the Myanmar military. Hedström explores how women as “revolutionary subjects” are involved in the armed resistance but also how their more invisible support weighs decisively in the Kachin struggle. The book offers a feminist perspective on an intractable conflict that is generally framed as focusing on the state and men. 
 
Noah Theriault, A forest of dreams
Noah Theriault spent several years, between 2010 and 2018, living in a Palawan community in the forests of northwestern Philippines. He sought to familiarize himself with the ways in which his hosts themselves, rather than the anthropologist, theorize the state, capitalism, and other forces of social and environmental change that profoundly affect their lives. The forest remains their most important source of food, shelter, and income. What makes this place particularly interesting is that it lies within the overlapping boundaries of three different territorial regimes: a recognized ancestral domain shaped by Indigenous rights legislation; a biodiversity conservation area grounded in state environmentalism; and what the author describes as an “encroaching hellscape” of monocrop plantations. Through a fluid and sensitive ethnography, Theriault develops what he calls a form of “radical empiricism,” inviting us to understand the world through the world-making practices of his Palawan interlocutors rather than reducing their experience to a narrative of dispossession. His approach reveals how they themselves interpret and navigate the forces transforming their environment and livelihoods. More broadly, the book shows how Philippine politics can position Indigenous peoples as symbolically central to debates about environmental protection while simultaneously marginalizing them from the decision-making processes that shape their territories and futures.