About - Asian Studies Association of Australia

Asian Studies Association of Australia

The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) is the peak body of university experts and educators on Asia in Australia.

Established in 1976, we promote and support the study of Asia in Australian universities and knowledge of Asia among the broader community. Our membership is drawn mainly from academics and students, but also includes industry and government Asia experts.

We take a strong interest in promoting knowledge about Asia in schools and in contributing to state and Commonwealth government policies related to Asia.

We provide informed comment on Asia to a broad public through our bulletin, Asian Currents, and specialist research articles in our journal, Asian Studies Review. Four book series published under our auspices cover Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia and Women in Asia.

We hold a biennial conference at which our members and other scholars share their latest research and build collaborative networks.

We highly value our international links and encourage the membership of scholars based outside Australia, as well as cooperation with Asian Studies organisations in the region and beyond.

We welcome all new members. As a member, you will receive the Asian Studies Review and be eligible for project grants and reduced conference registration fees.

Would you like to support the organisation that wants to support you? Read more about our Membership support.

Asian Studies Review

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2019

Terje Toomistu “Embodied Notions of Belonging: Practices of Beauty among Waria in West Papua, Indonesia”, Volume 43, Issue 4 of Asian Studies Review (2019)

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2018

Belinda Rina Spagnoletti, Linda Rae Bennett, Michele Kermode, and Siswanto Agus Wilopo, "Moralising Rhetoric and Imperfect Realities: Breastfeeding Promotions and the Experiences of Recently Delivered Mothers in Urban Yogyakarta, Indonesia," 42, no. 1 (2018).

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2017

Ian Chalmers, "Countering Violent Extremism in Indonesia: Bringing Back the Jihadists," 41, no. 3 (2017).

Wang Gungwu Prize Winner 2016

Devleena Ghosh, "Burma-Bengal Crossings: Intercolonial Interconnections in Pre-Independence India," 40, no. 2 (2016).

Prize winning articles are available free to access on the journal website.

Latest Books

Women in Asia Series

Women, Work and Care in the Asia-Pacific

Edited by Marian Baird, Michele Ford, Elizabeth Hill
This book provides a comparative analysis of the social, economic, industrial and migration dynamics that structure women’s paid work and unpaid care work experience in the Asia-Pacific region. Each country-focused chapter examines the formal and informal ways in which work and care are managed, the changing institutional landscape, gender relations and fertility concerns, employer and trade union responses and the challenges policy makers face and the consequences of their decisions for working women.

South Asian Series

India and the Anglosphere: Race, Identity and Hierarchy in International Relations

Alexander E Davis
Building on postcolonial and constructivist approaches to international relations, this book argues that the same Eurocentric assumptions about India pervade the foreign policies of the Anglosphere states, international relations theory and the idea of the Anglosphere. The assertion of a shared cultural superiority has long guided the foreign policies of the US, the UK, Canada and Australia, and this has been central to these states’ relationships with postcolonial India.

Southeast Asia Series

Soul Catcher: Java's Fiery Prince Mangkunagara I, 1726-95

M. C. Ricklefs
Mangkunagara I (1726-95) was one of the most flamboyant figures of 18th-century Java. Professor Ricklefs here employs an extraordinary range of sources in Dutch and Javanese—among them Mangkunagara I’s voluminous autobiographical account of his years at war, the earliest autobiography in Javanese so far known—to bring this important figure to life. As he does so, our understanding of Java’s devastating civil war of the mid-18th century is transformed and much light is shed on Islam and culture in Java.

South Asia Series

Sovereignty, Space and Civil War in Sri Lanka: Porous Nation

Anoma Pieris
This ambitious multiscalar spatial study of civil war in Sri Lanka offers an intersectional, de-ethnicised analysis of political sovereignty drawn out by the struggle for territory. Based on vital retrospective findings from the five-year postwar period, when wartime hostilities were still festering, it convincingly links ethnonationalism to postnational border politics, marketisation, militarised securitisation and illiberal democracy. This book argues that internecine conflict exposes the implicit violence within nation-state formations; mass human displacements heighten collective and individual ontological insecurity and neoliberalism makes the nation porous in unforeseen ways.