Podcasts about asian studies centre

In this episode of the ChinaPower Podcast, Dr. Steve Tsang joins us to discuss his new book The Political Thought of Xi Jinping, coauthored with Dr. Olivia Cheung. Dr. Tsang explains that Xi Jinping thought is vastly different from the thought and practices of his predecessors, such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping. Core to Xi Jinping thought is the desire to achieve China's national rejuvenation and the embracement of the “Tian Xia” concept of Chinese hegemony. Dr. Tsang points out that Xi seeks to position China in a more prominent role on the world stage. Dr. Tsang highlights that through Xi's efforts to centralize the Communist Party under his control and to create an alternative to the US-led international order, Xi aims to reshape policy both within China and abroad. Finally, Dr. Tsang shares his thoughts on how best to deter Xi Jinping.   Dr. Steve Tsang is Professor of China Studies and Director of the China Institute, SOAS, London. He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and an Emeritus Fellow of St Antony's College at Oxford. He previously served as the Head of the School of Contemporary Chinese Studies and as Director of the China Policy Institute at the University of Nottingham. Before that he spent 29 years at Oxford University, where he earned his D.Phil. and worked as a Professorial Fellow, Dean, and Director of the Asian Studies Centre at St Antony's College. 

Manan Amend (Columbia), gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series.

Manan Amend (Columbia), gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, written by Dr Priya Atwal. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire’s spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed. Panel includes: Dr Priya Atwal is Community History Fellow at Oxford. She is a historian of empire, monarchy and cultural politics across Britain and South Asia. She has taught History at King's College London and Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate. Her research has been featured in collaborative projects with Historic Royal Palaces, among others; and she makes regular broadcast appearances, most recently presenting the BBC Radio 4 series, Lies My Teacher Told Me. She tweets @priyaatwal. Professor Faisal Devji is a Professor of Indian History and the Director of the Asian Studies Centre at Oxford. His research focuses on political thought in modern South Asia, and is more broadly concerned with ethics and violence in a globalized world. He is the author of four books, most recently Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge and was formerly Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Professor Polly O’Hanlon is a Professor of Indian History and Culture at Oxford and co-course director for the MSc and MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies. Her research interests focus on the social and intellectual history of India. Her most recent book was At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India, which explores new approaches to questions about caste, gender, and religious cultures across a range of historical environments.

TORCH Book at Lunchtime webinar on Royals and Rebels: The Rise and Fall of the Sikh Empire, written by Dr Priya Atwal. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held weekly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all. In late-eighteenth-century India, the glory of the Mughal emperors was fading, and ambitious newcomers seized power, changing the political map forever. Enter the legendary Maharajah Ranjit Singh, whose Sikh Empire stretched throughout northwestern India into Afghanistan and Tibet. Priya Atwal shines fresh light on this long-lost kingdom, looking beyond its founding father to restore the queens and princes to the story of this empire’s spectacular rise and fall. She brings to life a self-made ruling family, inventively fusing Sikh, Mughal and European ideas of power, but eventually succumbing to gendered family politics, as the Sikh Empire fell to its great rival in the new India: the British. Royals and Rebels is a fascinating tale of family, royalty and the fluidity of power, set in a dramatic global era when new stars rose and upstart empires clashed. Panel includes: Dr Priya Atwal is Community History Fellow at Oxford. She is a historian of empire, monarchy and cultural politics across Britain and South Asia. She has taught History at King's College London and Oxford, where she obtained her doctorate. Her research has been featured in collaborative projects with Historic Royal Palaces, among others; and she makes regular broadcast appearances, most recently presenting the BBC Radio 4 series, Lies My Teacher Told Me. She tweets @priyaatwal. Professor Faisal Devji is a Professor of Indian History and the Director of the Asian Studies Centre at Oxford. His research focuses on political thought in modern South Asia, and is more broadly concerned with ethics and violence in a globalized world. He is the author of four books, most recently Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge and was formerly Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Professor Polly O’Hanlon is a Professor of Indian History and Culture at Oxford and co-course director for the MSc and MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies. Her research interests focus on the social and intellectual history of India. Her most recent book was At the Edges of Empire: Essays in the Social and Intellectual History of India, which explores new approaches to questions about caste, gender, and religious cultures across a range of historical environments.

Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series. This talk explores connections between ‘development' and the politics of agrarian reform in Sindh (Pakistan) during the period of transition straddling Independence. On the one hand, it highlights the place of development thinking in contemporary debates and policy making there before and after 1947; on the other, it acknowledges the role of the local hari movement in pushing for tenancy changes in the Sindhi countryside. Sarah Ansari conducts research primarily (but not exclusively) on the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of Sindh. Her publications have focused on a range of topics, including local religious elites (pirs) under British rule, the impact of Partition in both the short and longer term, and women's lives in Pakistan's early years. Her latest book Boundaries of Belonging; localities, citizenship and rights in India and Pakistan (co-authored with William Gould) was published in late 2019.

Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series. This talk explores connections between ‘development’ and the politics of agrarian reform in Sindh (Pakistan) during the period of transition straddling Independence. On the one hand, it highlights the place of development thinking in contemporary debates and policy making there before and after 1947; on the other, it acknowledges the role of the local hari movement in pushing for tenancy changes in the Sindhi countryside. Sarah Ansari conducts research primarily (but not exclusively) on the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of Sindh. Her publications have focused on a range of topics, including local religious elites (pirs) under British rule, the impact of Partition in both the short and longer term, and women’s lives in Pakistan’s early years. Her latest book Boundaries of Belonging; localities, citizenship and rights in India and Pakistan (co-authored with William Gould) was published in late 2019.

Sarah Ansari (Royal Holloway) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series. This talk explores connections between ‘development’ and the politics of agrarian reform in Sindh (Pakistan) during the period of transition straddling Independence. On the one hand, it highlights the place of development thinking in contemporary debates and policy making there before and after 1947; on the other, it acknowledges the role of the local hari movement in pushing for tenancy changes in the Sindhi countryside. Sarah Ansari conducts research primarily (but not exclusively) on the nineteenth and twentieth-century history of Sindh. Her publications have focused on a range of topics, including local religious elites (pirs) under British rule, the impact of Partition in both the short and longer term, and women’s lives in Pakistan’s early years. Her latest book Boundaries of Belonging; localities, citizenship and rights in India and Pakistan (co-authored with William Gould) was published in late 2019.

Cynthia Talbot (Texas at Austin) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series on Mughal India and the Rajput. What did loyalty mean to warriors in the rapidly changing political landscape of early modern North India? I look at three case studies from the late sixteenth century in which elite warriors had to make hard choices about their competing loyalties to family members and to their imperial overlord. The Rajputs of Bikaner, Bundi, and Udaipur all faced situations in which brothers and sons disagreed about submitting to Mughal authority and could be forced to fight each other as a consequence. The demands of new political allegiances thus came into conflict with older Rajput values derived from the heavily kin-based polities of the past, in an age before patriotism. This is part of a larger project that studies the martial sentiments found in Rajput narratives, as a foray into the history of emotions.

Cynthia Talbot (Texas at Austin) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre seminar series on Mughal India and the Rajput. What did loyalty mean to warriors in the rapidly changing political landscape of early modern North India? I look at three case studies from the late sixteenth century in which elite warriors had to make hard choices about their competing loyalties to family members and to their imperial overlord. The Rajputs of Bikaner, Bundi, and Udaipur all faced situations in which brothers and sons disagreed about submitting to Mughal authority and could be forced to fight each other as a consequence. The demands of new political allegiances thus came into conflict with older Rajput values derived from the heavily kin-based polities of the past, in an age before patriotism. This is part of a larger project that studies the martial sentiments found in Rajput narratives, as a foray into the history of emotions.

A century ago a deadly flu virus swept the planet, uniting the world in a disaster on a par with World War One.Over 50 million people died. Social distancing was put in place but drugs were ineffective, there was no vaccine, and in many places medicine could not cope. The world recovered but was never the same again. What can the last great pandemic teach us about how to combat Covid-19 today? Three world experts join Bridget Kendall: Laura Spinney, science journalist and author of Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World;. Svenn Erik Mamelund, historical demographer and research professor at Oslo Metropolitan University; Siddharth Chandra, director of the Asian Studies Centre and professor at James Madison College, Michigan State University. (Photo: Japanese school girls wear protective masks to guard against the influenza outbreak. Credit: Bettmann/Getty Images)

Public lecture by Professor Gyan Prakash (Princeton University) from 31 October 2018

Lectures of the J.P. And Beena Khaitan Visiting Fellow Prof. Tony K. Stewart 31 Jan 2017 In 1287 bs [=1879/80 ce] a short Bangla work was published in Calcutta under the title of Iblichnāmār punthi by the highly productive scholar Garībullā, who had composed the text about a century earlier. This somewhat unusual text is a colloquy between the Prophet Muhammad and the fallen Iblich (Ar. Iblīs), also called Saytān. The bulk of this fictional text is an interrogation of Iblich regarding the nature of his followers and their actions. The text is prefaced in its opening verses with a somewhat uneasy statement about the nature of the book and whether it was even appropriate to compose such a text it in the vernacular Bangla, a move that immediately draws attention to the language of the text itself and its intended audience. The opening section moves from one language conundrum to another until the attentive reader begins to realize that the fact one is reading the text in Bangla suggests that question and those that followed were actually moot, a set up for something else. Soon, the logic of the argument makes clear that such a conversation between the always untruthful Iblich and the always truthful Muhammad could only happen in a fiction—and it is perfectly fine to write fiction in Bangla. This move to fiction immediately alters the approach of the reader, who is rewarded with humorous, often naughty descriptions of the depraved and licentious acts of Saytān’s lackeys, parodies of the standard ’aḥādīth literatures regarding proper conduct—everything a good practicing Muslim is not! This fictional inversion of all that is good and proper titillates the reader in its mad escape from the Bakhtinian monologic of theology, history, and law that governs the discourse of the conservative Sunni (Hanbalite) mainstream. It is the exaggerated negative image of the law as seen from the imagined squalid underbelly of Bengali society. (This seminar is jointly sponsored by the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies, the Asian Studies Centre at St. Anthony’s College, and the History Faculty.) Prof. Tony K. Stewart specializes in the literatures and religions of the Bangla-speaking world, with a special emphasis on the early modern period. His most recent monograph, The Final Word: the Caitanya Caritāmṛta and the Grammar of Religious Tradition (Oxford, 2010), culminated a decades-long study of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava hagiographical tradition that included translating with Edward C. Dimock, Jr., The Caitanya Caritāmṛta of Kṛṣṇadāsa Kavirāja, Harvard Oriental Series no. 56 (Harvard, 1999). From the literatures of the Muslim–Hindu mythic figure, Satya Pīr, he published Fabulous Females and Peerless Pīrs: Tales of Mad Adventure in Old Bengal (Oxford, 2004) and is currently working on a monograph on the popular Bangla romance literatures of the pīrs. With prominent American poet Chase Twichell, he has published the first ever translations of Rabindranath Tagore’s pseudonymous Bhānusiṃha poetry titled The Lover of God(Copper Canyon, 2003). Stewart currently holds the Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Chair in Humanities and serves as a Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Vanderbilt University.

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 Antony’s College and the Oxford India Society.

China's Communist Party has proposed scrapping term limits from the constitution so President Xi Jinping can stay in power beyond two terms. The move has raised public dissent. What does this mean for China? Guests: Einar Tangen, China analyst and international politics and economics commentator Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Asian Studies Centre

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 issues of illegal migration, trafficking of drugs and people, armed conflicts, ecological devastation, movement of non-state actors and insurgent groups etc. The Mizos and the Chins who have shared common ancestral roots, religion, cultural and ethnic linkages etc are divided by a border which is creating differences. The presentation would aim to not only narrate a story of the history of these two communities but will also dwell into the current disputes that have arisen. Emotions have ranged from that of solidarity and toleration to hostility and animosity. The aim would be to give a glimpse of the region's 'contested' past and present in order to understand the intriguing power equations, complicated social relations and perennial xenophobia. Politics of exclusion and competition for livelihoods has interfered with the maintenance of durable peace. Understanding of these processes and giving a 'voice' to the voiceless is crucial for a better future in the region. Dr Reshmi Banerjee is currently a visiting scholar in the Asian Studies Centre in St. Antony's College. She was previously a research associate in the Centre of Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS) in SOAS, University of London where she worked on land conflicts in Myanmar and on the political economy of the Indo-Myanmar frontier. She has been a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of International Relations in the University of Indonesia (UI) and was a researcher in the Economic Research Center, Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI) in Jakarta. Reshmi has worked as a fellow in the Rajiv Gandhi Institute for Contemporary Studies (RGICS, New Delhi), has been a Visiting Professor in the Centre for North East Studies and Policy Research (Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi) and has taught in Delhi University and in the University of Indonesia. She is a political scientist with specialisation in food security and agricultural policies and has an MPhil and PhD in the subject from the Centre for Political Studies (CPS), Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. Her edited book Climate Change in the Eastern Himalaya: Impact on Livelihoods, Growth and Poverty was published in February 2015.

Dr Amy King, Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, The Australian National University, gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre. Conventional wisdom holds that the post-WWII international economic order was the product of a dominant Anglo-American power structure and the policy ideas of British and American officials. But this account overlooks the leading role played by Nationalist China at the 1944 Bretton Woods conference, and the People's Republic of China at the 1955 Bandung Conference. How did Chinese officials conceive of the changing relationship between the state, the nation and the global economy during this momentous decade? How did they define the relationship between the international economic order and China’s security interests? How did the international economic order intersect with evolving notions of Chinese nationalism? This paper outlines the conceptual framework underpinning a new project that seeks to sharpen our understanding of the connections between economics, security and nationalism, and to expand the empirical record on how non-Western states contributed to the international economic order at a critical juncture in its evolution.

Sheila Smith (Council on Foreign Relations) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre on 24th November 2015. No country feels China's rise more deeply than Japan. CFR Senior Fellow Sheila A. Smith will discuss her new book, Intimate Rivals: Japanese Domestic Politics and a Rising China. Smith explores the policy issues testing the Japanese government as it tries to navigate its relationship with an advancing China through intricate case studies of visits by politicians to the Yasukuni Shrine, conflicts at the East China Sea boundary, concerns about food safety, and strategies of island defense. Sheila A. Smith, an expert on Japanese politics and foreign policy, is senior fellow for Japan studies at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). She joined CFR from the East-West Center in 2007, where she directed a multinational research team in a cross-national study of the domestic politics of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. Smith was on the faculty of the department of international relations at Boston University (1994–2000), and on the staff of the Social Science Research Council (1992–1993). She has been a visiting researcher at two leading Japanese foreign and security policy think tanks, the Japan Institute of International Affairs and the Research Institute for Peace and Security, and at the University of Tokyo and the University of the Ryukyus. Smith teaches as an adjunct professor at the Asian Studies Department of Georgetown University and serves on the board of its Journal of Asian Affairs. She earned her PhD degree from the department of political science at Columbia University.

Christopher Ward (University of Exeter) gives a talk for the Asian Studies Centre.

Dr Lorraine Paterson gives a talk at the Southeast Asia Seminar on June 10th, 2015. Under French colonialism in Indochina, approximately ten thousand prisoners from Vietnam and Cambodia were deported to penal or exile sites within the wider French colonial world. From Gabon in Africa to French Guiana, these prisoners were transported for sentences ranging from five years to a lifetime. Many of these prisoners had committed common-law crimes but others were anti-colonial nationalists who occupied a grey area between political crimes and those considered to be piracy or banditry. Out of this group there was one prisoner who was exiled for longer and further than any other prisoner from any background. Indeed, given that he suffered his first exile at the age of twelve, and was only at liberty for another eleven months thereafter, he was the longest political prisoner in French colonial history. Born Nguyen Van Cam in the north of Vietnam, by the age of eight his prodigious powers of fortune telling and poetry writing had become renowned throughout northern Vietnam. At the age of twelve, he became the figurehead of an anti-French uprising in the town of Nam Dinh which led to a life of forced exile spanning the French colonial empire from Algeria to French Polynesia. This talk will explore how such an extraordinary personal life story can provide a lens through which to examine larger colonial and exilic contexts. As well as examine the possibilities and constraints of a new form of historical biography. Lorraine Paterson is a cultural historian whose work focuses on the lives of exiles from Indochina, and their cultural production throughout the wider French empire. She has a Ph.D. in History from Yale University and an M.A. in Asian Studies from Cornell University. Her forthcoming book, Exiles from Indochina in the Transcolonial World (Oxford University Press) will examine political exiles from French Indochina in various global geographic contexts throughout the French empire. She has also written various articles on Southeast Asian history including, a chapter, "Prisoners from Indochina in the Nineteenth Century French Colonial World," in a forthcoming volume Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration edited by Ronit Ricci and published by University of Hawaii Press. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at the Oxford Centre for Life Writing completing the biography of the Vietnamese political prisoner, Nguyen Van Cam.

A talk as part of the Southeast Asia Seminar Series Since the collapse of the authoritarian New Order regime in 1998, hundreds of Islamic laws have been adopted across Indonesia. Over the past years, scholars have examined both the causes and the consequences of these shari'a laws. Yet, existing research has yet to explain why and how these shari'a laws have actually spread across the country. For instance, why have some shari'a laws been adopted in many provinces and districts, while other shari'a laws can be found in a small number of provinces and districts only. Why is the diffusion of certain shari'a laws triggered by national political dynamics while other shari'a laws diffuse through local channels? Who are the political players that facilitate the spread of Islamic law from one locality to another? Based on several years of fieldwork in Indonesia, Michael Buehler's talk will examine the concrete mechanisms through which Islamic law has spread across the largest Muslim country in the world and draw parallels to other countries, including the diffusion of morality policies across the United States in recent decades.

As Burma (Myanmar) opens up to the world during a period of rapid change, Matthew J Walton, St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, explores the effects on Buddhist identities. Matthew Walton examines how Buddhists in the country are defining and redefining themselves, with reference to other religious groups, their own histories and a global Buddhist community, and how these identities are disseminated and contested through new communication technologies, new religious practices, and reimagined notions of what it means to be 'Buddhist' in Burma. The above gallery talk takes place in he British Museum, alongside an exhibition entitled "Pilgrims, healers and wizards Buddhism and religious practices in Burma and Thailand."

Dr Burak Akcapar talks on his book 'People's Mission: Dr. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission to the Ottoman Empire, 1912-13' published by Oxford University Press. The talk was given in Michaelmas term 2014 as part of the South Asia Seminar Series. Dr. Burak Akcapar, Author of 'People's Mission: Dr. Ansari and the Indian Medical Mission to the Ottoman Empire, 1912-13' (Oxford University Press).

The first talk given as part of the Southeast Asia Seminar, St Antony's College during MT14 In 1999 Timor-Leste was given the opportunity to vote on a self-determination referendum that put an end to centuries of Portuguese colonial and Indonesian neo-colonial rule. Two and a half year later, Timor-Leste proclaimed its Independence, and set off on a road to create a modern, democratic state. Fifteen years have elapsed, and today most observers consider that Timor-Leste has been successful in upholding its own democracy and the rule of law. However, the road along which the country has travelled is full of hurdles and several challenges were met with varying degrees of success. In this talk, I shall start by assessing the odds faced by Timor-Leste in its endeavour to create a democratic state, and will then consider four areas of political relevance: the process of constitution-making; the role of elections and the behaviour of the electoral administration; the choice of the government system; and finally the much protracted decentralization reform. I will conclude with some notes on the challenges to democracy in the near future

A co-sponsored event from the Asian Studies Centre, the Dahrendorf programme for the Study of Freedom, the Middle East Centre and North American Studies Programme from the world renowned from the author of the award-winning book a Secular Age

Roundtable Discussion on the future of Burma Burma is at a very sensitive moment in its transition. The peace process with ethnic armed groups is in a delicate phase, the divisive constitution is being debated in parliament, Buddhist nationalism pervades sectors of society, and elections in late 2015 could be the first relatively free polls in a generation. As Burma and its captive audience look to the future, this roundtable addresses the question of what lies in store. Drawing on different areas of expertise, participants will discuss: To what extent is 2015 likely to live up to expectations as a turning point in Burmese history? How will elite-level politics be affected by issues from below? And just how radically will the political landscape be transformed afterwards? Discussions will be informal and opened to the floor.