Hendrik Maier is Luce Professor Southeast Asian Cultures; attached to the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages, he teaches courses on Southeast Asian literatures, Indonesian/Malay, and issues of comparison and history. His main interest is Malay language and literature, in every form, from every place and time. He published a kind of survey of Malay writing in 2004 (“We are playing relatives”), and has since been engaged in adding very extensive footnotes, in particular dealing with older Malay poetry, the printed beginnings of Malay nationalism, and the question of sound and noise in writing. Old-fashioned or cutting edge, he is still very much intrigued by the notions of ‘Southeast Asia’ and ‘oral literature’.