Darlene Machell Espeña is Assistant Professor of Southeast Asian Studies at Singapore Management University (SMU). Her research interests include cinema, dance, culture, and politics in postcolonial Southeast Asia, the cultural history of the Cold War in Southeast Asia, and cultural discourses on education in Singapore. Her writings appear in journals such as Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Asia Pacific Journal of Education, and Asian Studies Review. She is working on her first book project, Imagi(ni)ng Southeast Asia: Cinema, Politics, and the Origins of a Region, which traces the cultural and ideological foundations of Southeast Asia as a region until the establishment of ASEAN in 1967.