Rate My Professor Arjun Subrahmanyan

Arjun Subrahmanyan is Senior Lecturer in Southeast Asian History and Academic Chair of History in the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences at Murdoch University. His research focuses on modern Thai history, including democratic idealism, the 1932 Thai Revolution, Buddhist modernism, propaganda and education in 1930s Siam, Cold War Thailand, and the Thai-Burma Railway. Subrahmanyan earned his PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley in 2013, with a dissertation entitled Reinventing Siam: Ideas and Culture in Thailand, 1920-1944. Prior to his current position, he held affiliations with Binghamton University (State University of New York) and served as Visiting Assistant Professor at Utah State University. He supervises PhD students on topics such as Vietnamese visual propaganda and property stories in the Philippines.

Subrahmanyan's key publications include the monograph Amnesia: A History of Democratic Idealism in Modern Thailand (State University of New York Press, 2021), which explores the idealism of Thailand's first democratic decade and its lasting impact on society. Other significant works are The Unruly Past: History and Historiography of the 1932 Thai Revolution (2020), Education, Propaganda, and the People: Democratic Paternalism in 1930s Siam (Modern Asian Studies, 2015, cited 18 times), Liberating Thai History: The Thai Past in an Asian Century (Manusya, 2024), Worldly Compromise in Thai Buddhist Modernism (2019), Asian Labourers, the Thai Government and the Thai-Burma Railway (2021), and Buddhism, Democracy and Power in the 1932 Thai Revolution (2017). He co-authored chapters in The US and the War in the Pacific, 1941-45 (2022). His scholarship has garnered 84 citations on Google Scholar. Subrahmanyan received a Humanities Travelling Fellowship for research on Democracy and Power in Modern Thailand and an Asia Study Grant for Democracy Fulfilled and Betrayed: Culture and Politics in Thailand, 1945-1958.