Asian Studies Centre

Dipyaman Chakrabarti speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' Workshop on 27 January 2018.

John Smith speaks at the 'Interrogating Buddhism and Nationalism' Workshop on 27 January 2018.

David Lewis speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 15 May 2018

Margot Finn speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 24 April 2018.

Carlo Bonura speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 25 April 2018.

Muhammad Ali Jan speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 1 May 2018.

Martin Bayly speaks at the International Relations of India Seminar Series

Akeel Bilgrami speaks at St Antony's College on 8 June 2018

Shashi Tharoor speaks at St Antony's College on 6 June 2018

Farouk Yahya speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 17 January 2018 The naga is a deified serpent that is a major part of the belief system of many South and Southeast Asian cultures. It is a chthonic creature, and is very strongly associated with rain and water. In Southeast Asia it plays an important role in divinatory practices for activities such as house-building, travelling and marriage. Th...

Farewell lecture for the Aung San Suu Kyi Senior Research Fellow in Modern Burmese Studies, Matthew J. Walton The field of Burma Studies has expanded rapidly in the past decade. Part of this growth has been fuelled by changes in Myanmar’s political conditions, as research opportunities have opened up on topics and in regions where the military government previously restricted access. Additionally,...

Salman Khurshid speaks at St Antony's College on 28 February 2018 Speaker: Salman Khurshid Former Minister of External Affairs, Former Minister of Law and Justice, Republic of India Respondent: Shruti Kapila Fellow and Director of Studies in History, Corpus Christi College; Lecturer in History, University of Cambridge Convened by Faisal Devji and jointly organized by the Asian Studies Centre of St...

Muhammad Samrez Salik speaks at St Antony's College on 8th March 2018 Can the China Pakistan Economic Corrridor (CPEC) affect regional stability and the prospect for peace? Will Russia, Iran, and China be part of a new regional order at this crossroads of empire? This event will feature and interactive discussion of the One Belt One Road (OBOR) Initiative and its impact on geopolitics.

Jane Duckett gives the 2018 Chun-tu Hsueh Distinguished Lecture This lecture examines 21st-century social policies and what they tell us about Chinese politics. At the same time it makes the case for more rigorous qualitative policy research, and it argues that international influences show it is time to reconceptualise Chinese policy processes.

Pavin Chachavalpongpun speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 8 November 2017. Thai foreign policy is traditionally shaped by the changing international environment. The coup of 2014 has exacerbated the political conflict and powerfully prescribed the way in which the country pursued its relations with the outside world. This talk argues that changing international circumstances have allowed the...

David Baulk, Mandy Sadan and Kai Htang Lashi speak at St Antony's College on 2 November 2017 As the world watches the Myanmar military decimate the country's Rohingya Muslim population, in northern Myanmar the military is fighting a war by other means. Across Kachin and northern Shan state, an estimated 120,000 people displaced by conflict are lacking food, shelter, and healthcare. As the conflict...

Syahrul Hidayat and Kevin W. Fogg speak at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 25 October 2017

Alessandra Mezzadri speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 7 November 2017 Drawing from Marxian and feminist insights, this presentation, based on a recently completed book, theorizes the garment sweatshop in India as a complex 'regime' of exploitation and oppression, jointly crafted by global, regional and local actors, and working across productive and reproductive realms. The analysis shows the ti...

Yasser Arafath speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 10 October 2017 As the entry of the Portuguese opened up a turbulent time in the Indian Ocean, Muslim scribal elites across the region presented them within the image of idolatrous infidels. Writing in Arabic, the scribes from Malabar categorised this period as the Age of Fasad (social disorder) and advocated for ‘valour’ as the counter strategy....

Jason Keith Fernandes speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 6 June 2017 Exploring the emotional terrain of the citizenship experiences of groups in Goa this paper argues that through the linguistic choices made by the government of Goa it is not merely caste that is at the centre of citizenship experiences but in fact untouchability itself. Given that languages are not abstract forms but actively em...

Jon Wilson speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 16 May 2017 Histories of the British empire in India often present it as a stable and effective form of state power and a coherent ideology. Drawing on the argument of his recent book, India Conquered. Britain’s Raj and the Chaos of Empire, Jon Wilson argues in contrast that the British never built a stable state in India. Their power was fractious an...

Teena Purohit speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 30 May 2017 This talk examined the writings of Jamal al-din al-Afghani (1838-1897) with particular attention to his polemical piece against Syed Ahmad Khan (1817-1898), entitled “The Refutation of the Materialists” (1881). Scholars have assumed that al-Afghani was anti-imperial and wrote this diatribe because Syed Ahmad Khan was pro-British. It is...

Akeel Bilgrami (Columbia), Shruti Kapila (Cambridge) and Saeed Naqvi (Foreign Correspondent and Author) speak in Oxford on 2 June 2017

Hayden J. Bellenoit speaks at the South Asia Seminar on 23 May 2017 The transition to colonialism in South Asian history has been a vibrant and hotly contested part of India’s history. The role of scribes as historical actors of change in India’s history has only recently been explored. This talk will examine how the formation of early agrarian revenue settlements exacerbated late Mughal patterns...

Pankaj Mishra, Shruti Kapila and David Priestland speak at St Antony's College on 3 May 2017 Shruti Kapila lectures at the Faculty of History and is a Fellow and Director of Studies in History at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge. Her publications include a co-edited special issue ‘Bhagavad Gita and Modern Thought,’ Modern Intellectual History (2010), and, as editor, An Intellectual...