Lawrence Chua, an assistant professor at the Syracuse University School of Architecture, has been awarded a 2020-21 Getty Scholar Grant from the Getty Research Institute (GRI) to study "transregional histories of utopia and the architecture and urban culture of southeast Asia."

According to the Syracuse University News, this year's research cohort is focused on pursuing investigations that seek to deepen scholarly efforts around the topic of "the fragment" and are set to focus on objects of study that remain in less-than-whole forms. The research also considers intact art and cultural objects as "fragments" of the larger cultures that generated these items. The Syracuse website states, "Incoming Getty Scholars are invited to address both the creation and reception of fragments, their mutability and mobility, and their valuation and consequence throughout history."

Chua tells Syracuse University News, “This is a competitive and prestigious award that allows me to begin serious work on a subject that has long engaged me. It comes just as my first scholarly monograph, Bangkok Utopia, is being published, so it gives me a precious head start on my next book.”

While at GRI, Chua is set to work on a research project called Siam Broken that investigates the ways that "fragments of Southeast Asia’s medieval and early modern past were studied, imagined, and reframed by historians, archaeologists, and political leaders in the 19th and 20th centuries."

“While my primary research draws on archives in Thailand and sites in South and Southeast Asia,” Chua explains, “the Getty’s research collections offer an unparalleled opportunity to compare site descriptions in Thai archival sources with historic photographic views of the South and Southeast Asian built landscape in the special collections.”

The nine-month fellowship period, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, will largely take place remotely at first, but will include travel to Los Angeles and Thailand, as well.