ASAA Oral History Project

Ruth, who took up a chair in modern history at Columbia University in New York in 2024, traces her journey in Asian Studies back to a short but fascinating visit to South Korea as a first-year university student. Ruth saw first-hand the earliest phases of South Korea’s democratic transition, and met numerous political activists and

Kate credits her fascination for and involvement in Asian Studies – and especially Indonesian history – to an eight-week backpacking holiday that she took with some friends in her late teens. She says it changed the way she looked at the world and drove her to learn more about Indonesia, and especially its history. An

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