Office Hours:

Office hours by appointment.

Research Interests

• Southeast Asia
• Nationalism
• Imperialism
• Oral history
• Human rights

Books

J. Roosa, Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-66 in Indonesia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2020. Co-winner of the George Kahin Prize, Association of Asian Studies, 2023: https://www.asianstudies.org/grants-awards/book-prizes/kahin-prize/

J. Roosa. Pretext for Mass Murder: The September 30th Movement and Suharto’s Coup D’Etat in Indonesia. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006. In Indonesian translation: Dalih Pembunuhan Massal: Gerakan 30 September dan Kudeta Suharto. Jakarta: ISSI dan Hasta Mitra, 2008.

J. Roosa; A. Ratih; H. Farid. Tahun yang tak pernah berakhir: memahami pengalaman korban ’65: esai-esai sejarah lisan. Jakarta: Lembaga Studi dan Advokasi Masyarakat (ELSAM) , 2004.

Articles/Book Chapters

J. Roosa, “Explaining the PKI’s Dark Defeat of 1965-1966,” in The Indonesian Left in the Twentieth Century, edited by L. Hongxuan, K. Stutje, and R. Subijanto (Leiden University Press, 2026).

J. Roosa, “The Presence and Absence of History in The Act of Killing,” in On the Act of Looking: Reading Joshua Oppenheimer’s Diptych, edited by R. Butler and D. Denny. Bloomsbury, 2026.

J. Roosa, “Indonesian Communism: The Perils of the Parliamentary Path,” in The Cambridge History of Communism, vol. 2. Edited by N. Naimark, S. Pons, S. Quinn-Judge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

J. Roosa, “The State of Knowledge about an Open Secret: Indonesia’s Mass Disappearances of 1965-66,” Journal of Asian Studies 75:2 (May 2016), pp. 281-297.

J. Roosa, “Conflicts within nations: separatism, civil war, and genocide”, Routledge Handbook of Southeast Asian History. Routledge, London, pp. 108-118, 2013.

J. Roosa, “Who Knows? Oral History Methods in the Study of the Massacres of 1965-66 in Indonesia”, Oral History Forum/d’histoire orale, vol. 33, pp. 1-28, 2013.

J. Roosa, “The September 30th Movement: The Aporias of the Official Narratives”, in The Contours of Mass Violence in Indonesia, 1965-68, D. Kammen and McGregor, K. Singapore: NUS Press and Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2012.

J. Roosa, “The Truths of Torture: Victims’ Memories and State Histories in Indonesia”, Indonesia, pp. 31-49, 2008.

J. Roosa, “President Sukarno and the September 30th Movement,” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 40, pp. 143-159, 2008.

J. Roosa, “Suharto (June 8, 1921 – January 27, 2008)”, Indonesia, no. 85 (April 2008), pp. 137-144, 2008.

J. Roosa, “How Does a Truth Commission Find out What the Truth Is? The Case of East Timor’s CAVR”, Pacific Affairs, vol. 80, pp. 569-580, 2007.

J. Roosa, “Violence and the Suharto Regime’s Wonderland,” Critical Asian Studies, vol. 35, pp. 315-323, 2003.

J. Roosa, “Passive revolution meets peasant revolution: Indian nationalism and the Telangana revolt”, Journal of Peasant Studies, vol. 28, pp. 57-94, 2001.

J. Roosa, “Solipsism or Solidarity: The Nation, Pramoedya Ananta Toer and Salman Rushdie”, Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 36, pp. 2681-2688, 2001.

S. Moore, “The Indonesian Military’s Last Years in East Timor: An Analysis of Its Secret Documents”, Indonesia, pp. 9-44, 2001.

“The Port of Tuban, a chapter from Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s historical novel Arus Balik,” translated with an introduction, Emergences, vol. 10, no. no. 2 (2000), 2000.

Non-referreed

“The Fantasy World of the US Empire,” Catalyst, vol. 3, no. 1, 2019. Also posted on the website Jacobin: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/12/vietnam-war-john-roosa-max-boot-brian-vandemark

“Sukarno’s Two Bodies,” New Mandala, May 26, 2014; https://www.newmandala.org/sukarnos-two-bodies/

“Book Banning in Indonesia: A Blast from the Past,” Jakarta Post, January 13, 2010. This op-ed was a response to the banning of the Indonesian translation of my book Pretext for Mass Murder.  https://www.thejakartapost.com/news/2010/01/13/book-banning-indonesia-a-blast-past.html

Winner of the Killam Teaching Prize, UBC, 2026