Tyrell Haberkorn

Tyrell Haberkorn researches and writes about state violence and dissident cultural politics in Thailand from the end of the absolute monarchy in 1932 until the present. She first traveled to Thailand in 1997 to be part of international feminist labor solidarity, and this became the basis for the past twenty-seven years of working across academic and activist lines to challenge state repression and other forms of injustice. She is currently writing a history of political imprisonment in Thailand that combines archival research, court observation, translation, and transgressive historiography to imagine the nation otherwise.

Prior to joining the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Wisconsin in January 2018, Tyrell spent eight years at the Australian National University in the Department of Political and Social Change. When forced to name a single discipline, she identifies as a political historian but has studied, researched and taught across law, political science, anthropology, sociology and comparative literature. She holds a BA (Cultural Studies and Creative Writing) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA and PhD (Sociocultural Anthropology, minors in Southeast Asian History and Rural Sociology) from Cornell University. She has received fellowships from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, Association for Asian Studies, Australian Research Council, Einstein Forum, the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Institute for Advanced Study at Central European University, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Council of Learned Societies.

She is interested in working with PhD students concerned with state violence, human rights, law, authoritarianism, left(s) and dissidence in Thailand and across Southeast Asia.