It gives me great pleasure to write the Foreword for The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies: Korea and Beyond. This book will indeed make its historical mark as the first edited volume for whose publication Korean scholars have taken the initiative and which addresses general issues in the development of Southeast Asian Studies. Within the past two decades the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) has published three books whose contributors were mainly Korean, but the main subject of which was Korea, especially bilateral relations with Southeast Asia, ASEAN, or individual countries in the region. With this particular publication, I expect and hope that Southeast Asianists from Korea will assume a more active role in, and make greater contributions to, the global community of Southeast Asian Studies.

This edited volume is the result of an international conference organized by the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sogang University (SIEAS) on 19–20 March 2010. I have witnessed and appreciated the tremendous efforts and infinite time contributed by the co-editors Professors Park Seung Woo and Victor T. King, to negotiate with the publisher, edit and copy-edit the manuscripts, communicate with the authors, and write the introduction. I should also mention the patience and sacrifice of the ten authors who have waited a longer than usual time for publication and thus helped SIEAS and Southeast Asian Studies in Korea come of age and enter the international stage.

Since the mid-2000s, SIEAS has mobilized various resources and initiated various programmes to promote Southeast Asian Studies in Korea. Particularly with the ten-year grants from the National Research Foundation of Korea, in 2008 SIEAS embarked on a comprehensive research and educational project under the banner of Southeast Asia as an Open Regional System: A New Paradigm for Communicating with the Globe and Reaching Out to the Public. Among its specific programmes, SIEAS organizes international conferences every year, one for our research clusters and the other for our international journal TRaNS: Trans-Regional and National Studies of Southeast Asia. We offer these conferences as a new venue for academic discourse on a global level. I hope that this edited volume will serve as an important stepping stone towards our global initiatives.