Pitch Pongsawat
พิชญ์ พงษ์สวัสดิ์

Pitch Pongsawat is an assistant professor and a director of the MA program in Government, and associate dean of the Faculty of Political Science, Chulalongkorn University, where he teaches modern Thai politics, politics of urban development, southeast Asian urbanization, political sociology, and modern Marxism. Pitch received his B.A. (Government) from Chulalongkorn University,  M.Phil. (Land Economy) from the University of Cambridge, and Ph.D. (City and Regional Planning) from the University of California at Berkeley (with a Doctoral Scholarship from the Harvard-Yenching Institute).  He was previously a visiting fellow at the University of Oxford, a visiting assistant professor at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, and a guest professor at the University of Passau. 

Apart from his academic publications in the fields of Thai politics and urban politics, Pitch has been working in the field of journalism in Thailand as a weekly contributor to several newspapers (currently with Matichon), a radio producer for the Faculty of Political Science’s program at Chulalongkorn University national radio, a producer and commentator for the internet television program Prachatai.com, and a daily commentator of Voice TV’s “Wake Up Thailand” and “Voice Insight”.  His research plan at Harvard-Yenching involves archival research on the history of Thai-Burmese border town dynamism based on newly released archival data of British Intelligence Reports in 19th and early 20th centuries. He will also extend his Ph.D. research on the border partial citizenship regime at the Thai-Myanmar border area, from the land-based border towns to sea border towns, to understand the peculiarity of the highly exploitative fishery political economy that forms the core process of urban and regional development in the lower part of Thai-Myanmar borderscape.