Henk Maier is Professor of Literature of Southeast Asia and Indonesia at University of California, Riverside. He received his Ph.D. in Indonesian from Leiden University, where he held the chair of Malay and Indonesian Language and Literature. His major interests have remained the same: the languages and literatures of Indonesia and Malaysia, which he now tries to understand within wider networks, in particular the socio-political and cultural interactions within the Southeast Asian region. He combines his scholarly pursuits with translating modern and older Malay texts. Professor Maier is the Director of SEATRiP, the interdisciplinary Southeast Asian Studies Program at UCR that, with its focus on Text, Ritual, and Perfomance, aims at developing new forms of engagement with Southeast Asia and its diasporas. He is currently working on a book about the emergence of the concept of ‘literature’ in Southeast Asia. Some of his major publications are In the Center of Authority – the Malay Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa (Cornell UP, 1988) and We are Playing Relatives – a Survey of Malay Writing ( Leiden, 2004).
