NIU Today

More than 125 alumni from NIU’s Southeast Asia Youth Leadership Program, which has included lessons in diplomacy and civic action, recently gathered in Jakarta for a U.S. State Department-sponsored summit. Their activities including the creation of a video that artistically expressed their opinions on human rights, one of the topics of discussion. “We wanted to...

NIU’s Jack Olson Gallery is hosting “The Arts Converge: Contemporary Art and Asian Musical Traditions,” a special exhibition that celebrates the creativity of contemporary artists who are working with traditional Asian music, sounds or cultural soundscapes. “The Arts Converge” offers an arena where visual arts media, musical creativity and theatrical performance can merge, the past...

Scholars and artists from around the world will convene Thursday through Sunday at NIU for Imagining Cambodia, the first international Cambodia Studies Conference to be held in the United States. The conference will: welcome eminent Cambodia historian David Chandler as keynote speaker Friday, Sept. 14; introduce Cambodian filmmaker Chhay Bora that same night at a...

Christopher McCord, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, is announcing leadership changes at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), as well as in Women’s Studies, the Department of English and LGBT Studies. McCord said anthropology professor Judy Ledgerwood has been selected to serve as CSEAS director. One of only nine federally...

A five-year effort to collect the oral histories of Cambodians who survived the Khmer Rouge era and now live in the Chicago area will culminate this week with an exhibit at the Cambodian American Heritage Museum (CAHM) and Killing Fields Memorial in Chicago. The exhibit resulted from a collaboration between the museum and Northern Illinois...

NIU professors and Cambodia specialists Kenton Clymer (history) and Judy Ledgerwood (anthropology) were at the proceedings last July in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, when the first verdict against a senior Khmer Rouge leader was handed down by an United Nations-backed international war crimes tribunal currently underway in that country. Clymer and Ledgerwood will discuss the verdict against...