Video Interview with Sophie Lemière, 2018-19 Lee Kong Chian National University of Singapore-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia

Prior to departing for Singapore and the second half of her Lee Kong Chian Visiting Fellowship on Southeast Asia , we sat down with Sophie Lemière , a specialist in Malaysian politics, to discuss the origins of her interest in Malaysia, the country's May 2018 electoral revolution and the prospects of its new governing coalition, what it was like to follow the Mahathir's election campaign, and some of her current projects.

A political anthropologist in the Ash Center for Democracy at Harvard University, Lemière is working on a political biography of Malaysia’s current prime minister Mohamad Mahathir that features his recent election campaign. She is the editor of a series of books on politics and people in Malaysia, including Gangsters and Masters (forthcoming 2019), Illusions of Democracy (2017), and Misplaced Democracy (2014). She has held visiting research positions at universities in Singapore, Australia, and the United States. Her PhD is from Sciences-Po in Paris.

The Lee Kong Chian Visiting Fellowship on Southeast Asia is part of a joint initiative by the National University of Singapore (NUS) and Stanford, whose aim is to raise the visibility, extent, and quality of research on contemporary Southeast Asia. Here at Stanford, the infrastructures for research is supported by our Southeast Asia Program .

Watch the video interview below. A transcript is also available.