Professor, Literature of Southeast Asia and Indonesia . Ph.D. in Indonesian, Leiden University, 1985.
Hendrik M.J. Maier received traditional training in philology and textual criticism of the languages of Indonesia at the University of Leiden, the Netherlands, where he held the chair of Malay and Indonesian Language and Literature before moving to UC Riverside in 2003. 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 has published widely on Malay writing/literature and history, and combines his scholarly pursuits with translating modern and older Malay texts. Some of his secondary interests include so-called “colonial literature” and the history of printed materials in Southeast Asia.
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). He has published a number of articles in the leading journals in his field, Indonesia and Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde.1