Asian Studies Centre

David Gilmartin speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016 This talk is licensed with Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 2.0

Phyu Phyu Thi and Matthew J. Walton speak at the Southeast Asia Seminar on 1 March 2017. Research and training conducted by the Myanmar Media and Society (M.MAS) project in 2015 encountered persistent expressions of fear and antagonism directed towards religious Others as well as articulated memories of solidarity and peace. People would often seek to reconcile the contradiction between these memo...

Layli Uddin speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Akbar Zaidi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Ali Usman Qasmi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Chris Moffat speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Nauman Naqvi speaks at the Intellectual History for Pakistan workshop on March 1st, 2016

Dr Katherine Butler Schofield speaks at the South Asia Seminar on March 8th, 2016 How do we write histories of the ephemeral: of affective and sensory experience, of devotional states and journeys, of the live performance of music and dance--of the tangible yet transient texture of the experiential moment? More critically, how do we write such histories when the moment has long passed into silence...

Professor Chaudhuri speaks at the South Asia Seminar on a public meeting held in Calcutta, on December 15th, 1829. On December 15th , 1829, a large public meeting was held amidst much excitement at the Town Hall in Calcutta. The speakers, principally from the British mercantile community in Calcutta, but including, prominently, Dwarakanath Tagore and Rammohun Roy, spoke on behalf of a petition to...

Professor Pradip Dutta speaks on Tagore at the South Asia Seminar Vishwabharati, the university that Tagore founded, was an early experiment in producing a global habitation. While many of the ideas that motivated this institution hold out resonances for the contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism, Tagore worked in the field of modern Indian thought. The tradition was strongly inflected by Vedantis...

David Timberman speaks at the Southeast Asia seminar. Drawing primarily on his own research, interviews and observations, David Timberman will address three topics: 1) the May 9 elections and what they reveal about contemporary Philippine politics, 2) the Aquino administration’s accomplishments and likely legacy, and 3) the political and socio-economic challenges facing the next administration. Da...

Dr Sanghamitra Choudhury speaks at the launch of her book on Women and Conflict in India The book launched at this talk analyses the impact that prolonged socio-political conflict in India has had on political and social spaces for women. Focusing in particular on Assam in the North East of India, it looks at how the conflict can be restricting, and yet can also have the potential to expand these...

Uday Chandra speaks at the South Asia Seminar Two decades ago, the historical anthropologist K. Sivaramakrishnan noted with a sense of irony that "elites assuming the task of building a national culture and providing it with a liberatory/progressive history have turned to modes of knowledge and reconstruction produced in the colonial period". This paper builds on this ironic comment to understand...

Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir (Menteri Besar - Chief Minister - of Perak, Malaysia) speaks at St Antony's College Dr Zambry Abdul Kadir was appointed as the 11th Chief Minister of Perak, a state in West Malaysia, in 2009. His academic background includes a PhD in Political Thought from Temple University, Pennsylvania and a Master's degree in Political Philosophy and Comparative Religion, also from Temple...

Dr Ward Keeler speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar. Traffic on city streets is the first of three scenes from everyday life Ward Keeler will use in this lecture to illustrate principles of hierarchy and power as they obtain in contemporary Burmese social life. The second is the public "Dhamma talks" or Buddhist sermons sponsored increasingly frequently at pagodas and neighbourhood festivals. The...

Dr Poh Soo Kai speaks at the Southeast Asia seminar on May 4th, 2016. Living in a Time of Deception is a study of Singapore history from the post-war period to 1965, which the author describes as a historical memoir. Part of Singapore’s agitation against colonial rule, Dr Poh Soo Kai remains one of the most respected former political prisoners in Singapore. While the establishment’s account of Sin...

Dr Pia Jolliffe speaks at the Southeast Asia Seminar Focusing on the Karen people from Burma/Myanmar in Thailand and in the United Kingdom, this talk analyses how global, regional and local developments affect patterns of learning. Based on Marcel Mauss' theory of the gift, the speaker will suggest considering "education" as a gift that establishes unequal relationships between those who give and...

Arshad Mohamed Ismail speaks on Islamic Finance at the Southeast Asia seminar Islamic finance is often seen as a segment that is experiencing exponential growth within the global financial arena. The industry is founded upon Islamic principles that prohibit charging of interest and engaging in speculative or gambling transactions, among others. Over the years, the industry has grown not just in te...

José Ramos-Horta, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and Former President of East Timor, speaks at St Antony's College. What the experience of Timor-Leste teaches us is that there are no short cuts to peace; peace is a journey that must be reached step by step, a foundation that has to be built block by block. In my country we had to heal the wounds of the body and the heart; we honoured the victims, we a...

Dr Hugo Meijer gives a talk at the International Political Economy of East Asia seminar. In light of the intertwining logics of military competition and economic interdependence at play in US-China relations, Trading with the Enemy examines how the United States has balanced its potentially conflicting national security and economic interests in its relationship with the People's Republic of China...

Dr S Y Quraishi gives the Oxford India lecture 2016. Guest of Honour: H.E. Mr Navtej Sarna, Indian High Commissioner to the United Kingdom This event is co-organised with the Oxford India Society.

Dr Reshmi Banerjee speaks at the South Asia seminar. Borders have always witnessed social and cultural interaction. They are dynamic trans-national zones/spaces which have seen both cooperation and conflict. They are treated as 'margins' of societies and economies and have hardly figured in the national consciousness and policies. The Indo-Myanmar border is a challenging area as it faces multiple...

NB: The first minutes of the presentation were not recorded. Professor Danny Quah speaks at the International Politics of East Asia Seminar Many writers have noted how the international system might be on the cusp of a change, where the "America Century" will no longer describe world order. If, however, the challenge to the established international regime arises from East Asia in general, or from...

Dr Dag Erik Berg speaks at the South Asian seminar. There has been a tendency in caste studies to explain the origins and existence of caste, relying on structural approaches to explain how it is produced and by whom. This paper seeks to step aside from such a focus in order to analyse enduring caste-based oppression of Dalits in India. To do so, I introduce the concept of mechanism of oppression,...

Drs Matteo Dian and Silvia Menegazzi give a talk on the AIIB at the International Political Economy of East Asia Seminar This presentation will analyse the strategy that led China to establish the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) and its likely consequences for the regional and global economic order. The creation of the AIIB embodies a considerable shift for the Chinese approach to regi...