Overview
Bryce Beemer is a historian of Southeast Asian and World History at Duke Kunshan University where he works on transregional slavery, labour exploitation, identity, and cultural exchange in precolonial Southeast Asia and Northeast India. He specializes in the histories of Thailand, Myanmar, and Manipur.
His first book, Creole Kingdoms in Southeast Asia: Slave-Gathering Warfare and Cultural Exchange in Burma, Siam, and Manipur, c. 1750–1850, is forthcoming from National University of Singapore (NUS) Press. The forthcoming Cambridge History of Southeast Asia will include a chapter by Bryce titled "Slavery, Warfare, Coercive Labour, and Migration in Early Modern Southeast Asia". His next research project will comparatively examine forms of religious slavery in Southeast and South Asia with a focus on Buddhist pagoda slavery in Upper Burma.
Bryce started at Duke Kunshan University (DKU) in 2019. Previously, he was a Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Transregional Research Fellow for InterAsian Contexts and Connections, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Comparative World History at Colby College.
His research has received support and generous funding from the Fulbright-Hays (DDRA) grant; the Watumull Foundation; the SSRC; and the Mellon Foundation. Bryce’s dissertation was awarded the 2014 Best Dissertation Prize by the World History Association, and his first publication "Southeast Asian Slavery and Slave-Gathering Warfare as a Vector for Cultural Transmission: The Case of Burma and Thailand" earned several academic awards for innovative methodology.
Bryce Beemer earned his PhD in Southeast Asian and World History from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa in 2013.