Indonesia: Balinese Identity and the Arts

Faculty and Staff

Ni Wayan Pasek Aryati, Academic Director
Ni Wayan Pasek Aryati is a Ph.D. candidate at Charles Darwin University of Darwin, Australia. Aryati comes from a small rice-farming community in the Tabanan region of Bali and remains deeply involved in the social and religious life of her native town.  She completed her B.A. in English Literature and Linguistics at Udayana University in Denpasar in 1988, and joined the Indonesian language teaching staff of the Bali, Indonesia Program of SIT in 1991. She was appointed coordinator of that program in 1992 and served in that capacity until 1997, when she and her family relocated to Darwin, Australia. In Darwin she worked as an Indonesian language instructor before returning to the SIT Program in Bali in 1999. In 2000-2001, she was one of the academic directors for that program, and subsequently took up posts with SIT in Western Samoa and North India. Her experiences in North India kindled her desire to make a comparative study of female images in the Hinduism of India and Bali. This led her to begin a graduate program in history and comparative religion at Charles Darwin University (CDU) in 2002.

Thomas Hunter, Ph.D., Senior Faculty Advisor
Thomas Hunter received his M.A. and Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of Michigan, and his B.A. in Indian Civilizations at the University of California, Berkeley. Dr. Hunter is currently a Guest Lecturer in Linguistics for the Faculty of Letters at UNUD (Universitas Udayana). 
Tom first served as the academic director for SIT Study Abroad Bali from 1989 to 1996, then again from 2000-2001, and in the North India Arts and Culture program in 2002-2003. During this period he carried out research and translation work supported by fellowships from the Fulbright Southeast Asia Regional Research Program (1992), the National Endowment for the Humanities (1996), Institute for Advanced Study at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2003-4), and the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin/Institute for Advanced Study of Berlin (2006-7). His current research interests include: the literary history of Java and Bali during the age of the "Sanskrit cosmopolis" (c. 400-1500 CE), modern Indonesian literature during the nationalist and post-colonial periods, and the linguistic anthropology of the Malay-Indonesian archipelago. 

Language Program Coordinator and Staff: The intensive Indonesian language course is conducted in cooperation between SIT and the BIPA Program of the Faculty of Letters of Udayana University (UNUD) in Denpasar. In English, BIPA (Bahasa Indonesia untuk Penutur Asing) means "Indonesian Language for Non-Native Speakers".
Language Instructors Include:

Drs. I Wayan Sidhakarya, M.A.
Wayan Sidhakarya (Pak Wayan) is one of the longest serving members of the SIT Study Abroad community in Indonesia, having been with the program since the late 1980s. He completed his M.A. in Linguistics at the University of Oregon in 1996 and was a Fulbright Teacher in Indonesian for the Southeast Asia Summer Studies Program (SEASSI) in 1999. His main topics of interests include: linguistics, teaching methodology, meditation, and Indian philosophy.

Drs. I Made Yudiana
Made Yudiana (Pak Yudi) joined the SIT Program in Bali in Fall 2001. He completed his B.A. in English at Udayana University the following year. Before joining the SIT Program in Bali he worked for many years in the NGO field, especially for Bali Hati, an NGO specializing in educational support for children of lower income families in Gianyar and Badung regencies. He devotes much of his free time to further developing his mastery of English and often provides assistance to local institutions delivering English language courses to native speakers of Indonesian.

Drs. I Made Rajeg, M.A.
Made Rajeg (Pak Rajeg) is the Secretary of the BIPA Program as well as the Head of the M.A. Program in Japanese language at UNUD. He has studied abroad in Japan (University of Reitaku, Tokyo) and Australia (Macquarie University) where he gained teaching certificates in Japanese and English before returning to his post as a Lecturer at UNUD. He is interested in meditation as well as traditional Indian forms of healing based on understanding the "flow of life" (prana) in the human body and nature.