Overview
Namfon Narumol Choochan (she/her) is a doctoral student in history at Cornell with a focus on modern Southeast Asia. Broadly, she studies the histories of gender and sexuality with particular attention to how race, empire, and nationalism shaped social and gender relations in Cold War Thailand. Her current project examines the sex economy on the U.S. military bases in Thailand from 1961 to 1975, focusing on the construction of racialized and gendered social categories of women working on these bases. She is also interested in oral history and the politics of absence in historical knowledge production.
Prior to joining the History department, she received a master's degree in Asian Studies from Cornell with a thesis titled “Bourgeois Ideal of Femininity: The Creation of Ideal Thai Womanhood and Post-absolutist Modernity, 1940s-1950s.”
Namfon also hosts the Gatty Rewind Podcast, where she interviews speakers from the Southeast Asia Program's Gatty Lecture Series.
Advisor: Tamara Loos