About Us
Dr. Yuangrat Wedel
Dr. Yuangrat Wedel was born in the southern province of Surat Thani, where her grandfather was a senior royal official. She grew up in nearby Nakhon Srithammarat before spending a year of high school in upstate New York as an exchange student. She graduated from Thammasat University and later taught there. Dr. Yuangrat left Thailand to study in the United States shortly before the 1976 events. Many of her university friends and classmates were swept up in the violence. She has a doctorate and a masters degree in political science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her doctoral thesis and subsequent research for the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore concentrated on the adaptation of Marxism by Thai radical thinkers. This work provided much of the material for Radical Thought, Thai Mind.
Yuangrat’s career
Yuangrat has taught political philosophy and studied Thai political ideology at Thammasat University, Ramkhamhaeng University, and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. She taught Thai culture at Assumption University and served as vice dean for research. At Chulalongkorn University’s Institute of Asia Studies she researched Southeast Asian economic developments, traveling to Vietnam and Cambodia. That academic experience was followed by more than a decade of work in rural, community and child development for UNICEF and Plan International, a private non-profit organization. Most of that work was in remote areas of the north and the northeast.
Dr. Yuangrat has family and personal links to a reform strain of Buddhism based on the thinking of Buddhadasa Bhikku. Close relatives included a herbal doctor, a revered Buddhist monk, a mid-wife and a casino owner.
Paul Wedel
Paul Wedel grew up in a small town in New Jersey and was the first in his family to graduate from college. With a degree in English literature, he taught English in a rural southern Thai school as a member of the US Peace Corps and produced programs on an educational television channel for two years for the Bangkok government.
Returning to the United States in 1975, Paul worked in the auto industry as a labor union member before winning a scholarship from the Columbia School of Journalism. He earned a master of journalism degree, writing his master’s degree paper on the violent political struggles in Thailand from 1973-76. After graduation, he won a six-month traveling fellowship awarded by Columbia to write about the aftermath of the Indochina War.
Paul’s Career
Paul then spent the next 14 years working in the region as a reporter for the United Press International. Some of his work focused on the Communist insurgency in Thailand, the Communist victories in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia and the later shifts to market economies in those countries. He also reported from Burma, India, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Hong Kong, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
Paul later served for 19 years as executive director and ultimately president of the Kenan Institute Asia, a Thai non-profit organization that seeks to improve the quality of education, strengthen public health systems and make free enterprise work more effectively for development.
He taught courses on Southeast Asia as an adjunct professor for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With Terry Fredrickson, he wrote English by Newspaper, which showed English learners how to use the language and style of newspapers to improve their reading.
Yuangrat and Paul together
Working together, Paul and Yuangrat wrote Radical Thought, Thai Mind on the history of leftist political thinking in Thailand and collaborated on a number of other articles. They are now working on an historical novel set in southern Thailand at the end of the reign of King Chulalongkorn.
They are also writing a blog on the research for the novel and the relation between Thai history and current events.
They enjoy biking, ballroom dancing and working with their daughters Jinda, a digital marketing expert and magazine writer, and Pailin, an award-winning documentary film-maker.