The Channel: A Podcast from the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS)

This episode features a conversation about the Matua community with Carola E. Lorea , Professor of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Tübingen. Lorea is interested in gender, oral traditions, and popular religious movements in South Asia, and she leads the ERC-funded project MANTRAMS: Mantras in Religion, Media, and Society in Global Southern Asia . Lorea is the author of Folklo...

This episode features a recording from a recent event hosted at the International Institute for Asian Studies. On May 18, José Pintor Aguilar gave a talk about the importance of public diplomacy and collaborative knowledge exchange, drawing especially on his work as the Director General of Casa Asia in Barcelona. The Casas’ network represents an innovative approach that the Spanish government has...

This episode features a conversation with Nandan , a filmmaker and writer from Keralam, India. After training and working as a civil engineer, Nandan moved to Mumbai to pursue his passion for filmmaking. As an author, he has published four books:  The Dream Balloon ,  Manam ,  New Desertlands , and  Click , and he has also contributed to several comic anthologies. Nandan’s film...

This episode features a conversation with four colleagues involved in the International Consortium for Indian Ocean Studies (ICIOS) . Mahmood Kooria is Lecturer in the History of the Indian Ocean World at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are in the premodern Indian Ocean world, global history of law, Islamic cultures, matrilineal-matriarchal communities, Afro-Asian connections,...

This episode features a conversation with Arjan Rietveld , a writer and curator in the world of electronic music . Arjan is the founder of Field Records , which has released a string of experimental and artistically driven albums since the label was launched in 2008. In this discussion, Arjan introduces  Waterworks , a multimedia project he spearheaded which catalogues the...

This episode features a discussion on current research into China's Belt and Road initiative, particularly as it relates to the Global South.  Jewellord T. Nem Singh  is a Principal Research Fellow in Global Political Economy at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex. He is the author of  Business of the State: Why State Ownership Matters for Resource Governanc...

This episode comes from our friends over at The Migration Menu , a podcast co-hosted by James Staples and Luke Heslop , both based at Brunel University London . As anthropologists with research interests in South Asia, James and Luke created The Migration Menu podcast series to highlight the interrelations of food, global migration, and identity, specifically as related to South Asian communities...

This episode features a conversation with two cultural geographers, Ben Anderson and Vickie Zhang , in which they discuss a collaborative project they spearheaded and recently released, one that provokes their discipline and also embodies an alternative mode of academic thinking and publishing. In late 2024, Ben and Vickie circulated an unconventional announcement welcoming very short reflections...

This episode features an interview with  Timothy Simpson , Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Macau. Tim's interdisciplinary research focuses on Macau's urban culture, architecture, and tourism industry, tracing the city's history from a colonial Portuguese territory into one of the world's most renowned and lucrative sites of casino gaming. His most r...

This episode features a conversation with Vinthya Perinpanathan and members of the ADAM Quartet about musical exchange and artistic collaboration across genres and histories. The ADAM Quartet is a young string quartet consisting of Minna Svedberg (viola), Margot Kolodziej (violin), Julia Kleinsmann (violin), and Renée Timmer (cello). The group formed in Amsterdam and has performed at major venues...

This episode features a conversation on Beijing's urban soundscape with Colin Chinnery, an artist and curator based in China. Chinnery is a co-founder of Sound Art Museum in Beijing. This museum opened to the public in 2023, and it offers visitors a history of the city through sounds. Sound Art Museum is an immersive space, which also features natural soundscapes, languages, and music from ar...

On this episode of The Channel , we’re featuring a full episode from our friends over at the Nam Phong Dialogues podcast . Nam Phong Dialogues is hosted by two Vietnamese American scholars, and the show excels at presenting Vietnamese intellectual and sociopolitical history in ways that are accessible, engaging, and relevant for understanding contemporary global issues. The two co-hosts are Kevin...

This episode features a discussion with Jacob Schmidt-Madsen about Game Studies and the history of South Asian board games. Jacob is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He earned his PhD in Indology in 2019 from the University of Copenhagen, where he still remains an Affiliated External Researcher. His work focuses on the history, structure, and...

This episode features Aarti Kawlra , Academic Director of the Humanities  Across  Borders program at IIAS, hosting discussion about indigo with three colleagues, scholars, and educators. Jody Benjamin is an Associate Professor of History at Howard University. His recent book is  The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850   (Ohio Unive...

This episode of the podcast is a special discussion connected to our upcoming event,  Africa–Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge , which will take place in Dakar from June 11-14. Because not everyone will be able to join us in person, we thought it would be meaningful to bring you some of the conversations and ideas that have inspired this third edition of the event – previously held in Ghana (2015...

In this episode, current IIAS Research Fellow Zhengfeng Wang hosts a conversation on transregional architectural history in the Asia-Pacific. She is joined by Amanda Achmadi, Paul Walker, and Soon-Tzu Speechley, all from the University of Melbourne. The three guests recently co-edited the volume Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific: Built Traces of Intercolonial Trade, Industry and Labour, 180...

On this episode of The Channel, we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at Southeast Asia Crossroads , a podcast from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University . We at IIAS have frequently crossed paths with members of the team behind Southeast Asia Crossroads , and we’ve long wanted to do re-post one of their episodes on our feed. A perfect opportunity...

This episode features a conversation with Mustahid Husain , who is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Toronto Mississauga . His work explores a variety of themes, from international development and global inequality to mental health and the Bangladeshi diaspora. He is the author of two new books. The first is a short academic monograph, Masculini...

This episode features a conversation about contemporary Indonesian politics, with a special focus on the role of Islam. In October 2024, Prabowo Subianto was sworn in as the president of Indonesia. In the Presidential election back in February 2024, he had quite handily defeated his two competitors, Anies Baswedan and Ganjar Pranowo, with 59% of the popular vote. This 2024 election was the third t...

This episode features a conversation with the team behind the exhibition Asian Bronze at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam . The ambitious show celebrates 4000 years of bronze art and the central role of bronze in the traditions of Asia. Ranging from prehistoric objects to contemporary artworks, the exhibition includes pieces from India, China, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, Vietnam, Pakistan, Nepal, and Kor...

On this episode, Laura Erber hosts a conversation with two distinguished historians from the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil: João José Reis and Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo. These scholars represent two generations of researchers committed to reinterpreting and deepening our understanding of the complex relationships between Brazil and Africa. João José Reis is one of Brazil’s foremost hist...

This episode features a conversation about the debates and land disputes surrounding the development of airports in Asia and Africa. As airport construction projects proliferate across the Global South – often seen as a fast-track to development and modernization – new tensions frequently emerge, particularly when it comes to the huge tracts of land required for these new infrastructures. My guest...

In this episode, Soheb Niazi interviews Laurence Gautier about the history of two Muslim educational institutions – Aligarh Muslim University and Jamia Millia Islamia – and what these reveal about the politics of Muslim identity and the position of Muslims in post-Partition India. That topic is the subject of Gautier’s new book,  Between Nation and ‘Community': Muslim Univ...

Thomas Berghuis is a curator and historian of Asian art based in The Netherlands. Berghuis recently curated the exhibition Home and the World in Museum Van Loon , an historical building in the canal district of Amsterdam. In this exhibition, fourteen contemporary artists from all over the world used different spaces of the Van Loon canal house to explore the intricate connections between coloniali...

This episode brings together two historians who have recently published biographies of 20th-century Indian radicals. The first guest, Ole Birk Laursen is an historian whose work focuses on anarchism and anti-colonialism from the mid-19th century to the mid-20th century, with a focus on South Asian activists in exile. His first book, Anarchy or Chaos: M. P. T. Acharya and the Indian Struggle for Fr...