WANG Lezhi
王乐之

Lezhi is a historian of indigenous peoples and environments in Southeast Asia, trained at the National University of Singapore. He is now putting finishing touches on his dissertation, which recounts the much-forgotten becoming of mid-river contact zones in the colossal island of Kalimantan between 1890 and 1957. The dissertation reveals the island’s current renown, or rather notoriety, in global environmental conservation efforts to be much more deeply embedded in colonial imaginations and negotiations than academics previously assumed. Combining archival forensics and field observations, the project took him on a rewarding journey around Indonesia, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Germany, and Switzerland. Arriving at HYI at a later stage of this project, Lezhi looks forward to workshopping his research outputs and potential new research initiatives with the graduate and faculty community at Harvard, and hopefully could make a meaningful impact on its nascent Southeast Asian studies milieu.