The 53rd Annual Meeting of the Council on Thai Studies (COTS) was held October 3-5 in our beloved Ingraham 206, presided over by Nathan McGovern, Professor of Asian Religions at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and an affiliate faculty member of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UW-Madison. COTS is a consortium of Thai Studies programs that serves to promote Thai Studies in the Midwest, with hosting of the annual conference rotating among member schools. This year’s annual meeting, hosted by UW-Madison, was a huge success, with thirty-five participants and numerous other people in attendance. The conference featured two keynote speakers. The first, who doubled as the Friday Forum speaker on Oct. 3, was Megan Sinnott, alum of UW-Madison and current faculty member at Georgia State University, who spoke about her research on Thai hell parks in a lecture entitled “Market Transformations and the Possibilities of Desire within the Spirit World in Thailand.” The second keynote speaker was Peera Panarut of the Asian Art Museum in Berlin, who spoke on Saturday about his work on Central Thai manuscript cultures in a lecture entitled “New Trends and Challenges?: Thai Buddhist Manuscript Studies in the 21st Century.” There were three roundtables over the course of the weekend: a digital roundtable on the Thai-Cambodian border conflict organized by Nalin Sindhuprama; a roundtable to discuss Nathan McGovern’s recent book Holy Things: The Genealogy of the Sacred in Thai Religion, organized by Erick White; and, as a fitting capstone to the conference on Sunday, a roundtable in celebration of Katherine Bowie’s career, organized by her former and current students. In addition, the conference featured eight panels of papers on a variety of subjects and from a broad spectrum of disciplinary approaches to Thai Studies, with contributors from UW-Madison and other participating COTS schools, as well as from around the country and the world. These contributions featured work both from seasoned scholars and from the exciting emerging work of graduate students and recent PhD graduates. Many thanks to all those who worked to make this meeting of COTS a success, including especially Mary McCoy, Mike Cullinane and the entire staff of CSEAS; Ian Baird and Katherine Bowie; and Penguin, Poppy, Adrian, and all thegraduate students of the Southeast Asia Research Group (SEARG).
