About Research

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— What are the most surprising or exciting findings you have uncovered so far?

When I began my academic studies to be a historian, I found that film records of the early twentieth century tended to be relegated to the “slow lane” of historical inquiry. This was in part due to a long-standing preference for text-based primary sources. While the ‘pictorial turn’ of the humanities in the 1990s led to a closer interrogation of paintings and photographs, even decades later, few historians, especially in Southeast Asian Studies, considered non-fiction film as viable material. Yet, when I started to scour visual records at various archives, I found a vast reservoir of untapped sources that held the promise of expanding our understanding of the past. I was hooked from then on. Taking advantage of my early-career experience with film archives, I located newsreels, travelogues, and propaganda films to assess and critique the exhaustive colonial propaganda produced in the Netherlands East Indies. This was the subject of my monograph Celluloid Colony (NUS, 2021). In more recent years, I have been amazed by the holdings in the archives of the Imperial War Museum (UK) and Beeld en Geluid (Netherlands), which capture, albeit in disturbing coverage at times, much of the post-war/pre-independence era in Southeast Asia. Did you know that executions were filmed in Singapore but not in Nuremberg or Tokyo? I only discovered this a few months ago. These relatively untapped resources keep me going. After arriving in Kyoto last month, I learned that Professor Yamamoto and his colleagues had published a series of working papers on the haunting paintings that artist Akira Noda created while a Japanese Surrendered Personnel (JSP) in Endau, Malaya, after the war. I would never have known about this had I not come to CSEAS.

— What tools, must-have gear, or methods are essential to your work, and why?

Portable hard disc space and a 2TB Google Drive account are key, as some of the film files are large. Sometimes I re-edit material on my Mac using Final Cut Pro software; for this, a nice, big screen was a wise investment. I lugged that screen from Malaysia to Kyoto. Additionally, one must be extremely methodical: creating Excel sheets, combing through newspaper articles, corroborating the metadata, and spending hours watching the material several times. A good night’s sleep is important.

Research Inspiration

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— Is there a specific moment or event that made you decide to enter this field?

In 1999, long before I became an academic, I watched Vincent Monnikendam’s Mother Dao,  a film assembled from Dutch footage shot in colonial Indonesia. I knew something about early cinema by then, having worked with ethnographic film archives at the Smithsonian, but this material—seamy, gorgeous, and extremely disturbing all at once—was unlike anything I had seen. That initial shock never left me and eventually led me to embark on a PhD. I met Monnikendam in Leiden, and he became an ally in my journey. Sadly, he passed away earlier this year.

— Please tell us about a memorable episode with an impactful person(s), place, or thing that you encountered while doing your research.

In 2012, the Dutch academic and archivist Nico de Klerk said to me, “Colonial filmmaking can’t be colonial all the time.” This short, simple line made me realize that we should not treat materials deemed “colonial-produced” as untrustworthy or devoid of meaningful, realistic ethnography. One should never reject source material, regardless of its origin.

Societal Impact

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— Reflecting on your journey, what qualities or habits do you think are essential for researchers aiming to create meaningful societal impact?

I think that researchers can benefit from moving out of their comfort zones. Our skills, while mostly academic in nature, can also be applied to address social issues directly. This involves working with communities at the epicenter of their most pressing problems. Many researchers already do this, providing us a rich trove to learn from in terms of interconnectivity. From 2009-2012, I collaborated with displaced Acehnese and other local partners to make a film about the challenges of navigating a post-tsunami era. In 2016, I volunteered at a refugee camp in Greece, serving food; this led to several returns and the emergence of a documentary film. Currently, a PhD student of mine is working on the Rohingya situation in Malaysia. I can work with her because I took a detour from the archives to learn about displaced communities.

Life Beyond Research

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— Could you tell us about yourself beyond your research?

Even in my 50s, I realize that there are new avenues that I am not too bad at if I apply myself. While they may not be aligned with my main academic work, they certainly add to my ability to think in an interdisciplinary manner and teach more engagingly. An example is my foray into fiction writing. It might stand to reason that as a historian, I was excited about the prospect of writing a historical novel and even imagined that it would be easy and I would be good at it. However, it became an extremely humbling experience and took me many years to complete my first book, A Flutter in the Colony. Historical research and fiction writing, while overlapping somewhat, are not the same thing. I learned this the hard way, but now I have a better handle on how to develop characters and stories. Indeed, I even teach a first-year class in writing.

I think the most helpful approach is to consider ahead of time what sort of person your fictional character is. Are they weak yet resolute in some ways? Are they stubborn and fallible? Are they vain but redeemable? Will they go through a major realization during the course of your story? In some ways, this is more important than the actual plot. You put these people in a historically plausible setting (the one that you have chosen) and try to lumber through. I like to develop the story by incrementally treading ahead with my characters, imagining what they would be thinking or saying, without embellishment. One needs to be careful not to succumb to ‘presentism,’ which is a fancy word for thinking about the past through a contemporary moral outlook. If the crudeness of your characters makes you cringe, you are probably doing something right. There is no need to whitewash to avoid offending people—one has to be honest about the setting and the context. And, as film editors like to say, you have to be prepared to ‘murder your darlings’ in the interest of readability. After all, who wants to read a history lecture, no matter how well-researched it is? One should never assume that just because someone has picked up a book marketed as ‘historical fiction’ that they know, or are even keen to know, any of the history. You need to worry about what will make the reader turn to the next page. Don’t make history your crutch.

Advice for the Next Generation

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— What advice would you give to younger scholars or young people interested in pursuing a career in your field or in becoming a researcher?

Diversify. Specialization, especially in the humanities, is something of the past. All fields have become persuasively interdisciplinary. The best work will likely come from those who have broad approaches to their fields. We all need to learn how to do qualitative research, conduct interviews, understand statistics, read media files, and document our work. No one discipline will give you all these skills. Having said that, yes, there is a reason why we still have our silos and departments; rigor in one discipline is still key for depth, but it can be complemented with other approaches. Think about the best works you have read in recent years, aren’t they almost all a combination of disciplines?

— What is one piece of advice you wish you had received earlier in your career?

Keep an ongoing bibliography of everything you read and watch. Everything. This will jog your mind about things that you can revisit, even years later.

Looking Ahead

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— Please tell us about your future plans as well as your thoughts on the future of your field and on research in the region.

Given the way media is being voluminously digitized, uploaded, and disseminated today, the next generation of scholars will navigate modern repositories with far more ease—almost none of the special training that I had will be required. With technology no longer an impediment, the field can focus on developing new epistemological tools that explore several questions: What can we learn from these exhaustive visual sources? Can Asian Studies benefit from a thorough reappraisal and inventory of the scattered visual records around the world, in particular from the Pacific theater, an area less publicized on film than Europe? Just as importantly, what pedagogical lessons and challenges do we need to consider as new material continues to be generated? I think students today have a strong, intuitive ease in working with media. If we can combine that skill with robust training in language and culture—in my case Asian Studies through an inter-regional lens—we can create scholars with new insights into how to accommodate the twenty-first-century implosion of visual data and produce innovative, first-rate research.

Sandeep Ray is Associate Professor and Head of the School of Humanities at the University of Nottingham Malaysia. He studied at Hampshire College, the University of Michigan, and the National University of Singapore. A practitioner/academic, he specializes in the intersection of colonial history, nonfiction film, and Southeast Asian cinema. Ray is the author of Celluloid Colony: Locating History and Ethnography in Early Dutch Colonial Films of Indonesia, which was a finalist for the EuroSEAS Social Science Book Prize 2021, and the historical novel A Flutter in the Colony  (Harper Collins, 2019). Ray has published in leading journals, including the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, positions, and the American Historical Review. He serves as a peer reviewer for multiple academic publications and has been invited to film festivals as a jury member and curator. Ray has directed several documentaries, including The Sound of Old Rooms (2011), which won the Grand Prize at the Taiwan International Documentary Film Festival. In June 2025, he was elected to the Council of the International Association for Media and History (IAMHIST) for a 4-year term. He will be a Visiting Research Scholar at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies from June to September 2025.