Tani Sebro

I am an Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Politics at Cal Poly Humboldt (Humboldt). Prior to joining the faculty at Humboldt, I was an Assistant Professor of Diaspora Studies, Human Rights, and Transnational Migration in the Department of Global and Intercultural Studies at Miami University, Ohio. My research and teaching interests span the subdisciplines of political ethnography, critical political theory, Asian cultural studies, mobilities studies, performance studies, and international relations, with a particular emphasis on refugee politics in Southeast Asia.

As a Norwegian-American growing up in an immigrant community in Oslo, Norway, I became interested at an early age in how exiled groups form senses of belonging in the diaspora. I later lived and studied in Thailand, where I became interested in the plight of Burmese refugees. As a dance practitioner (I study Ballet/Middle Eastern/Indian/Tai/Thai), I engage my research community through practice and performance. My in-progress book manuscript, Aesthetic Nationalism: The Dance of War and Exile along the Thai-Myanmar Border, is based on embedded field research in Northern Thailand, where I conducted ethnographic and archival research with Tai refugees from Myanmar. My work has appeared in Critique of Anthropology, the Review of Human Rights, Political Geography, and various edited volumes. For a full list of current publications, see my CV.

In 2022, I received a Fulbright ASEAN U.S. Scholar Research Fellowship to conduct research with Tai (Shan) migrants and activists along the Thai-Myanmar Border. I was also awarded the 2022 McCrone Award for Most Promising Scholar at Cal Poly Humboldt. In 2018, I received a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship to study the Politics of East Asian Buddhism at the East-West Center. I was the 2015 Moscotti Fellow for Southeast Asian Studies, and my research has received funding from The École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), and language training from several Foreign Languages and Area Studies Fellowships, as well as a fellowship from the Fulbright-Hays Group Projects Abroad Program for the Advanced Study of Thai.

I served as Co-Chair of the Burma Studies Group from 2021-2024, and I co-founded the American Political Science Association’s Political Ethnography Working Group with Osman Balkan. I am also a member of numerous academic associations, including the Asian Studies Association, the Association for Political Theory, the Dance Studies Association, and the American Political Science Association.

I currently serve as Co-Chair of the International Advisory Committee and as Humboldt's representative on the CSU Academic Council on International Programs (ACIP). I also serve as the campus Fulbright Program Advisor and encourage prospective Fulbright applicants to contact me.