Dr. Vilashini "Vila" Somiah (she/her) is a feminist anthropologist specialising in Malaysian Borneo. Of mixed indigenous heritage herself, she is a tenured Senior Lecturer in the Gender Studies Programme at Universiti Malaya. She received a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian Studies from the National University of Singapore under the supervision of Assoc. Prof. Dr. Oona Paredes (now of UCLA). She is passionate about the narratives and agency of Bornean women, migrants, and indigenes, and other sexual and gender minorities, which are often underrepresented. Dr. Somiah also has an interest in human-non-human interaction, a theoretical focus within the field of Anthropology and the social sciences.

 

Dr. Somiah co-edited Revisiting Covid-19 in Malaysia: Plight and perseverance (UM Press, 2023) and “Sabah from the Ground: The 2020 Elections and the Politics of Survival (SIRD/ISEAS, 2021). Her first single authored book, Irregular Migrants and the Sea at the Borders of Sabah, Malaysia: Pelagic Alliance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022) won the ACUM (The Universiti Malaya Award for Outstanding Achievement) for the best Social Science book of 2022, which has also received favourable reviews internationally. She is currently working on her fourth book on the Academic Mongrel.

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Dr. Somiah has almost fifteen years of mixed methods research experience and has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Sabah, Sarawak, and the Peninsular of Malaysia. She has been a recipient of numerous grants and awards for her important work which includes the Tun Abdul Razak Chair Graduate Scholarship at Ohio University, The Graduate Research Scholarship at the National University of Singapore, the ASEAN-Australia Visiting Fellowship, and other prestigious national and international grants. In 2024, Dr. Somiah was a Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics (LSE), supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and SEANNET. In 2025, she was appointed a Harvard University Asia Centre Associate (2025-2026). That same year, she was elected to the Southeast Asia Council at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) in the United States, a position she will hold until 2028. 

 

Outside academia, Dr. Somiah co-founded the Datum Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to equipping activists and advocates working with marginalised communities- including stateless persons, people living with disabilities, indigenous groups, the LGBT community, and underrepresented women - with data competency skills. The initiative aims to support these communities in building sustainable databases that not only enhance their own advocacy efforts but also position them as key stakeholders in policymaking discussions. Through this effort,  she continues to write on and speak about the local socio-political landscape and oppressions.