ssociate Professor of Theatre and Dance Craig Latrell recently returned from two research trips to Southeast Asia funded by the Mellon Foundation and Christian Johnson Foundation. The first trip, in early spring, took him to the Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, Malaysia (the northern part of Borneo Island), Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. Latrell's purpose was to visit a number of tourist "villages" to study the role of performance in constructing representations of local cultures, and to see how they relate to other national and global identities.

In April he gave a presentation concerning this trip titled "Exotic Dancing: Tourist Performance, Authenticity and Global Culture in East Malaysia" as part of the Hamilton Asia Forum. In May Latrell returned to Sarawak for the harvest festival Gawai Dayak, for the purpose of comparing the tourist version of the festival as performed at Sarawak Cultural Village with its practice in the native longhouses.

Latrell also recently accepted an offer to serve as an editor (in the area of contemporary SE Asian theatre) of the Encyclopedia of Asian Theatre, which will be published in two volumes totalling 400,000 words by Greenwood Press.