ASAA Oral History Project

Professor Tim Wright’s distinguished academic journey began with a chance encounter in 1960s Yorkshire with an inspiring schoolteacher whose enthusiasm for East Asia prompted Tim to study Chinese at university in 1967. He recalls the intensity of his undergraduate training—focused almost entirely on modern and classical Chinese texts—and his first visit to China in 1971, […]

Natali Pearson is a Senior Lecturer and DECRA Fellow at the University of Sydney, specialising in maritime heritage in Southeast Asia. Her journey into Asian Studies began with a high school trip to Vietnam in 1994, which sparked a lasting fascination with the region. After a year on a language and culture program in central

Professor Ed Aspinall shares his journey into Asian Studies, which began when he lived in Indonesia as a teenager while his father worked as an agricultural scientist in Malang, East Java. This experience sparked a lasting passion for the region, leading him to study Indonesian at school and university, and later become involved in activist

Ele traces her ‘origin story’ in Asian Studies/the study of Asia to her upbringing in Darwin as a child, where she began to learn the Indonesian language, where she had Indonesian friends, and where a rich variety of cultures and languages coexisted. Even at a young age, it gave her a strong sense of what

Garry describes himself as primarily a political economist whose work is informed by political theory. It was only during his doctoral research, and something by accident, that his work developed an empirical focus on Asia. What began as a thesis that intended to learn how Australian firms were relocating production to (Southeast) Asia sparked an

Jarrah’s Indonesian / Australian background and early childhood years growing up in Bali were formative of his interest in the history of Indonesia. During his PhD studies, under the guidance of Professor Adrian Vickers, he began studying the historical texts of Indonesia; the traditional chronicles and genealogies of Bali, Java and the Malay world. Jarrah