The Asian Studies Association of Australia (ASAA) is pleased to announce that Dr Colum Graham, a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Asian Research Institute at the National University of Singapore, has won the 2024 John Legge Prize. Dr Graham completed his PhD in the Department of Political and Social Change, the College of Asia and the Pacific, at the Australian National University, under the supervision of Professor Edward Aspinall.
The John Legge Prize is ‘awarded to a thesis conferred by an Australian university’ which ‘deal[s] wholly with a country or countries of Asia or with Australia’s relationship with Asia. The thesis must be in humanities or social sciences disciplines, broadly defined.’ The John Legge Prize is one of the ASAA’s long-running means of recognising excellence in Asian Studies in Australia, dating back to 1997. The prize is named in honour of John Legge, who was the ASAA’s inaugural President when it was founded in 1976.
Dr Graham was a worth winner of the 2024 prize. His doctoral thesis, Persisting Peasants? A Political Economy of Agrarian Transitions in Indonesia, received outstanding reports from its examiners and was also praised by the judges of this year’s prize: Professor Huiyun Feng (Griffith University), Professor Robert Cribb (Australian National University), and Dr Yeow-Tong Chia (University of Sydney). The ASAA is grateful to these colleagues for the time, expertise, and effort which they put into the judging of this year’s field.
There were 12 entries in the running for the prize this year, covering disciplines as diverse as international relations, literature, sociolinguistics, and international education. As one of the judges noted, ‘The range of topics, the range of disciplines deployed, and the number of countries investigated are testament to the continuing strength of Asian Studies in Australia’. Special mention must go to Dr Minglei Wang (Flinders University) for his thesis, Chinese Cultural Diplomacy in the 21st Century: The China Cultural Centre Project, which was recognised with the award of a Runner-Up prize. The ASAA congratulates Dr Wang on his achievement.
Dr Graham’s Persisting Peasants was praised for its originality, insights, and rigor. One of the panellists referred to the ‘outstanding depth of fieldwork underpinning his research and … his mastery of the immense complexity of his fieldwork results’, while another said the thesis was ‘an interdisciplinary tour-de-force, featuring 18+ months of immersive fieldwork in East Java. It offers a rich ethnography and a novel political economy framework for Asian Studies, explaining Indonesia’s stalling agrarian transition by highlighting the state’s causal role and the centrality of debt in rural communities’.
As the ASAA approaches its 50th anniversary in 2026, it is heartening to see such positive affirmations of the quality of research being conducted by Australian researchers in the field of Asian Studies. We congratulate Dr Graham and other entrants for undertaking such compelling research and wish them well in their careers.
David Hundt
President, Asian Studies Association of Australia, 2025/26
Associate Professor of International Relations, Deakin University