Senior Lecturer
University Teaching Officer
St John's
Biography:
Tomas Larsson is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of St John’s College. He received a PhD in Government from Cornell University in 2007. From 1990 to 2000, he worked as a freelance journalist based in Southeast Asia. As an undergraduate, he studied East and Southeast Asian Studies and Thai at Lund University, Sweden.
Research Interests
Politics of Southeast Asia; political economy; religion and politics; democratisation.
Research supervision
Dr Larsson has supervised MPhil and PhD theses on a range of topics, mainly relating to Southeast Asian politics. These include: Cambodian nationalism; constitutionalism in Thailand and Japan; central banking in Thailand; the Khmer Rouge Tribunal in Cambodia; opposition politics in Malaysia; political culture in Singapore; social movements in Thailand; sex trafficking in Cambodia; ASEAN and human rights; Malaysian foreign policy; ethnic violence in Indonesia.
Teaching
Dr Larsson is course organiser for Pol 14: Politics of Asia, and he also teaches on Pol 4: Comparative Politics. At the MPhil level, he contributes to Comparative Politics and Religion and to Research Methods in International Relations and Politics.
Key Publications
▪ Land and loyalty: Security and the development of property rights in Thailand (Cornell University Press, 2012).
▪ ‘Monkish politics in Southeast Asia: Religious disenfranchisement in comparative and theoretical perspective.’ Modern Asian Studies 49:1 (2015): 40–82.
▪ ‘The strong and the weak: Ups and downs of state capacity in Southeast Asia.’ Asian Politics & Policy 5:3 (2013): 337–358.
▪ ‘Western imperialism and defensive underdevelopment of property rights institutions in Siam.’ Journal of East Asian Studies 8:1 (2008): 1–28.
▪ ‘Intertextual relations: The geopolitics of land rights in Thailand.’ Political Geography 26:7 (2007): 775–803.
For a full list of scholarly publications, please go to: