Dr Vilashini Somiah is a feminist anthropologist from Sabah, Malaysia, and a Senior Lecturer in the Gender Studies Programme at Universiti Malaya. She holds a PhD from the National University of Singapore, an MA from Ohio University, an MRes from Universiti Malaya, and a BA from Universiti Malaya. Her research centres on underrepresented narratives of women, migrants, and interior Bornean communities, with a particular focus on marginality, survival, and lived political realities.

She is co-editor of 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 monograph, Irregular Migrants and the Sea at the Borders of Sabah, Malaysia: Pelagic Alliance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), received the Universiti Malaya Award for Outstanding Achievement (ACUM) for Best Social Science Book and has gained international recognition. She is currently completing her fourth book on the lives and resilience of Bornean women, under contract with University of Hawaii Press.

Dr Somiah was a Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics in 2024, supported by the Henry Luce Foundation and SEANNET, where she researched Indigenous women entrepreneurs in Sabah and forms of entrepreneurial resilience in the post–Covid-19 period. She was also an ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute Visiting Fellow in 2025, focusing on subaltern politics in East Coast Sabah in the lead-up to the 2025 Sabah state elections. She currently serves as a Harvard Asia Center Associate (2025–2026) and was elected to the Southeast Asia Council of the Association for Asian Studies (AAS), where she will serve until 2028. In 2026, she was awarded the Greenberg Chair Visiting Scholar Bursary at the University of Ottawa.

Beyond academia, she writes widely on Malaysia’s socio-political landscape and is co-founder of the Datum Initiative, a regional research observatory working at the intersection of data, justice, and inclusive socio-economic transformation in Southeast Asia. To know more about her works as a scholar and with Datum visit www.vilashinisomiah.com and www.datum-initiative.com