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Roles
SOAS-Alphawood Postgraduate Diploma in Asian Art Co-convenor, Arts of Southeast Asia (online) module
Qualifications
PhD, Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley
MA, International Affairs and International Economics, Johns Hopkins University, School of Advanced and International Affairs (SAIS)
BA, East Asian Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University
Email address
mc139@soas.ac.uk

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Dr Melissa Carlson researches the development of Southeast Asian modernism in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. 

She is an interdisciplinary scholar, drawing on oral histories, visual analysis, ethnographic and archival methods, to examine how artists conceptualize modernity and the avant-garde art world in Burma/Myanmar. In 2024 she curated an exhibition “Against the Tide: Myanmar Art in the Moment” and advised on the modern and contemporary section of the 2024 Burma to Myanmar exhibition at The British Museum. 

Her book project focuses on how modernism unfolded in Socialist Burma under isolationism, censorship, and authoritarianism. She completed her PhD in South and Southeast Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley in 2023 and a Masters in International Relations from Johns Hopkins University, SAIS in 2013. 

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  • “Modern and Contemporary Art Activism (1948 - Present)” in Burma to Myanmar, The British Museum, London: The British Museum Press, 2023. 
  • “The ‘Free-floating’ Srinagar Biennale: Kashmir’s Distant Traumas Transported” in March Meeting 2020: Unravelling the Present, Sharjah Art Museum, 2021.
  • “Painting Through the Cheroot Haze: Censorship of Female Artists in Socialist Burma, 1962-1988,” in Ambitious Alignments: New Histories of Southeast Asian Art, 1945-1990, edited by Stephan Whiteman, Yvonne Low, Sarena Abdullah, Phoebe Scott. Sydney: Power Institute Press, 2018.
  • “Painting as Cipher: Censorship of the Visual Arts in Post-1988 Myanmar” in Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia, 31, No. 1, March 2016 
  • “Art Versus Artifice: Contemplating Burmese Contemporary Art” in Orientations, Vol. 46, No. 4, May 2015
  • “Painting Between the Lines” in ArtAsiaPacific, Issue 91, Nov/Dec 2014

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  • South and Southeast Asian modern and contemporary art
  • Modernity and National identity in postcolonial Southeast Asia
  • Socialist cultural networks in Southeast Asia
  • International relations with a focus on the politics and culture of South and Southeast Asia and China

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Email
mc139@soas.ac.uk
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