Meredith Weiss

Meredith Weiss is Professor of Political Science and founding Director of the SUNY/CUNY Southeast Asia Consortium. She has published widely on social mobilization and civil society, the politics of identity and development, electoral politics and parties, institutional reform, and subnational governance in Southeast Asia, with particular focus on Malaysia and Singapore. Her latest books are The Roots of Resilience: Party Machines and Grassroots Politics in Southeast Asia (Cornell, 2020) and the co-authored Mobilizing for Elections: Patronage and Political Machines in Southeast Asia (Cambridge, 2022). She has also edited or co-edited over a dozen volumes, most recently, Routledge Handbook of Civil and Uncivil Society in Southeast Asia (Routledge, 2023) and Putting Women Up: Promoting Gender Equality in Myanmar Politics (ISEAS, 2024). Her articles appear in Asian Studies Review, Asian Survey, Critical Asian Studies, Current Sociology, Democratization, Journal of Contemporary Asia, Journal of Democracy, Journal of Human Rights, World Politics, and other journals. Her primary current projects include collaborative studies of urban governance and public-goods delivery, of civil society in Southeast Asia, and of youth politics in Asia; and a monograph on Malaysian sociopolitical development.

Professor Weiss co-edits the Cambridge University Press Elements book series on Politics and Society in Southeast Asia and is associate editor for Southeast Asia of the Association for Asian Studies’ (AAS) Journal of Asian Studies. She was co-founder and inaugural chair of the Southeast Asian Politics related group of the American Political Science Association (APSA), has chaired the Southeast Asia Council of the AAS and APSA’s Asia Workshops steering committee, and was a co-founder of the Women in Southeast Asian Social Sciences (WiSEASS) network. Having worked previously at the East-West Center Washington and DePaul University before joining the department in 2008, she has also held visiting fellowships or professorships in Australia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and the US. She received her MA and PhD in Political Science from Yale University and a BA in Political Science, Policy Studies, and English from Rice University.