Dr. Thamora Fishel is the Associate Director of the Southeast Asia Program (SEAP). She supports SEAP faculty and students by managing the SEAP administrative office, coordinating SEAP's National Resource Center grant, and overseeing the Kahin Center for Advanced Research on Southeast Asia. Her projects have included SEAP's winter session study trip and class, Cornell in Cambodia, and the Burma/Karen Project in SEAP Outreach which provides resources and trains educators and community service providers about the cultures, history, and politics of recent refugees from Burma.

Thamora is passionate about getting more undergraduates to Southeast Asia and encouraging them to study Vietnamese, Burmese, Filipino/Tagalog, Thai, Indonesian, and Khmer. An anthropologist by training, she speaks Thai (as well as some Chinese and a little Burmese) and did research on gender, local politics, and civil society in Thailand. More recently she has been deeply engaged in SEAP's Myanmar Initiative and is involved in developing a study abroad class on 'Gender and Global Change in Myanmar.' Before returning to Cornell in 2007 as Outreach Coordinator for SEAP, Thamora taught anthropology at Franklin and Marshall College and California State University, Long Beach. She lives in Trumansburg with two kids, one dog, four cats, and more than a dozen chickens.