Intellect

May Adadol Ingawanij joined CREAM after completing her Ph.D. at the London Consortium, University of London (with Prof. Laura Mulvey). Her thesis, Hyperbolic Heritage: Bourgeois Spectatorship and Contemporary Thai Cinema, traces the relationship between cinematic spectacle, royalism, and the Thai bourgeois fantasy of attaining global prestige by displaying ‘world-class Thainess’. The research has been published in Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2007), South East Asia Research (2006), and Representing the Rural (2006). May is one of the organisers of the Annual Southeast Asian Cinemas conference, the main forum of intellectual exchange concerning the region’s cinemas held on a rotating basis in each of its countries. With Benjamin McKay she is editing the first volume of critical writings on the independent cinemas of the region.

She has taught world cinema at Goldsmiths and the University of East London, and was previously a presenter/translator with the BBC World Service, Thai Section.