Following undergraduate study in history and anthropology at the University of Michigan (BA, 1950), Joel M. Halpern studied at the renowned anthropology department and Russian Institute, (renamed the Harriman Institute in 1982) at Columbia University. He received his doctorate in 1956 for a study of the village of Orasac in Serbia in the former Yugoslavia. The resulting work became the basis of his Ainsley award winning book, A Serbian Village (N.Y., 1958). He began his career with the Human Relations Area Files office at the American University in Washington, D.C. working on a Laos handbook. Subsequently, he went to that country as a Field Service Officer with the Community Development Division of the U.S. International Cooperation Administration. He served as chair of the Mekong Seminar of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group of the Asia Society which advised the U.S. Aid program. Halpern was a member of the faculty at UCLA, Brandeis, and the Russian Research Center at Harvard (1965-1967) before coming to UMass Amherst in 1967.
Halpern's work in Laos began as a Junior Foreign Service Officer with the US Operations Mission (USOM) in the late 1950s. He left in 1959 after completing some of the first American scholarship of the region including his twenty-two part study, the Laos Project Papers. He also produced numerous other works on Laos and relations between the United States and Laos during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Ultimately, Halpern returned to Southeast Asia in 1969 as the chair of the Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group (SEADAG) Mekong Seminar. The SEADAG Mekong Seminar focused on the creation of a number of dams along the Mekong River in Laos and Thailand. Joel Halpern remains a Professor Emeritus of the Anthropology Department at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
James A. Hafner received his B.A. from Miami University (Ohio) and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. He became a member of the University of Massachusetts Amherst faculty in 1970. He has extensive experience in Southeast Asia, primarily in Laos and Thailand. His studies included working with the United Nations Mekong Committee studying the Pa Mong Dam project and its impact on the people of Laos and Thailand as well as other projec involving international development. Hafner's experience in Southeast Asia also includes working on U.S. Department of State Mekong Basin Development projects and a Senior Fulbright Fellowship to study on rural development at Khon Kaen University in Thailand.
Many of his teaching and research interests focused on processes of rural social and economic change in the context of the development process. His past research in Southeast Asia involved studies of traditional water transport systems, the impacts of highway development on the development process, population ecology and rural poverty, and new models and strategies for participatory and integrated rural development. He is currently completing work on a study of the political ecology of forest use and access in Thailand while working on a review of long-term population-land use dynamics in the northeast region of that country. This focus evolved from research begun in 1983 under his Fulbright Award and subsequent work begun in 1985 with an interdisciplinary team of Thai foresters and social scientists to study forest land encroachment and land use in upper watershed areas of northeast Thailand.
From the guide to the Southeast Asia Collection MS 407., 1905-1992, (Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst)
