Seminar-room history across Asia.
Asian Studies Centre is an academic audio archive of seminars, book events, and research interviews centered on Asia, with a strong recent emphasis on South Asian history and coin collections. Its episodes move patiently through evidence, institutions, archives, and the politics of how knowledge is made.
PRESS PLAY
Asian Studies Centre is an academic podcast feed of lectures, seminars, book events, and research interviews connected to Asian studies at Oxford. Its recent episodes lean strongly toward South Asian history, museum collections, and Indian numismatics. The pacing is measured and institutional. Speakers are introduced with care, projects are situated before the argument begins, and the conversation often follows the logic of archival research rather than broadcast storytelling. That gives the show a distinctive texture. It sounds close to the seminar room. Shreya Gupta’s interviews on South Asian coin collections form a clear recent thread, moving through the Ashmolean, the British Museum, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the networks of collectors, curators, scholars, and dealers around them. These episodes ask what happens to Indian coins after they enter UK museums. They also ask whose labor and knowledge become visible when collections are named after European male collectors. The details are precise: catalogues, databases, display cases, exhibitions, research trips, numismatic societies, and the challenge of making tiny objects legible to the public. The feed is not only about coins. One event follows Ashish Rai’s argument about how the Indian National Army trial unsettled British rule and hastened acceptance of Indian independence. Another examines Idi Amin, the Organization of African Unity, Afrocentrism, and the Ugandan Asian expulsion. A Modern South Asian Studies seminar places agrarian reform in Sindh within the politics of development after partition. Across these episodes, the show returns to institutions and power: armies, museums, states, scholarly societies, colonial records, and public memory. It is demanding audio. It rewards listeners who are comfortable with names, dates, specialist vocabulary, and long academic framing. Its appeal lies in access to research conversations while they are still close to the evidence.
Made for: For listeners who want scholarly Asian history with archival depth, especially South Asian politics, museums, and numismatics. It best suits researchers, students, collectors, and historically curious listeners comfortable with formal academic pacing.
What sets it apart: The show’s edge is its proximity to live scholarship: seminars, research interviews, and collection histories presented with the texture of academic work intact. It gives unusual attention to Indian coins as historical evidence and to the institutions that preserve, classify, and interpret them.
The Asian Studies Centre was founded in 1982 at St Antony's College and is primarily a co-ordinating organisation which exists to bring together specialists from a wide variety of different disciplines. Geographically, the Centre predominantly covers South, Southeast and East Asia. The Asian Studies Centre works closely with scholars in the Oriental Institute, the Oxford China Centre, the Contemporary South Asian Studies Programme and the Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies (in premises at St Antony's). The Asian Studies Centre is host to the Taiwan Studies Programme, Modern Burmese Studies Programme, the South Asian History Seminar Series and the Southeast Asian Studies Seminar Series.
A coin stops looking like a button once you hear the history attached to it.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused account of how the INA trial unsettled imperial confidence in the soldiers who sustained it.
Ashish Rai treats the INA trial as a political shock whose force ran well beyond the courtroom. He traces Japan's worsening wartime position, the INA's defeat, and the lifting of censorship in India in August 1945, when many Indians read the army's failed campaign against the…
A measured conversation about coin collections, overlooked contributors, and the museum decisions that shape access.
Shreya Gupta's conversation with Joe Cribb follows the afterlives of South Asian coin collections in UK museums by starting with figures often pushed to the edge of their histories: Indian dealers, scholars, and collectors who helped shape holdings now in Oxford, London, and…
A thoughtful conversation about the Indian people and networks behind South Asian coin collections in UK museums.
South Asian coins become a way into a broader history of museum collecting, as Dr. Shalindra Bhandari reflects on his career and on the Indian networks behind major collections now held in UK museums.
A reflective look at how coin collections become histories of collaboration, inquiry, and remembered labor.
Jan Lingen's conversation with Shreya Gupta treats South Asian coin collecting as more than a field of objects. It becomes a story about research, shared labor, and the people whose contributions can sit quietly behind famous collections.
A focused conversation on South Asian coin collections, hidden expertise, and who gets to make museum objects legible.
Shreya Gupta's interview with Robert Bracey looks at how South Asian coin collections in UK museums came together, and at the people pushed out of view when those collections were organized around European male collectors' names.
Chinese history as pressure, power, and consequence.
History with wit, books, and sharp detours.
A college course on empire, war and what followed.
["Asian Studies Centre's interview with Joe Cribb follows Shreya Gupta's project on the British Museum coin collection, the Ashmolean Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum.", "Gupta says she is a third-year PhD researcher at the University of Exeter and the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, working on an EHRC-funded project called Decolonizing Collections.", "Cribb traces his start at the British Museum to a Latin-and-Greek degree, a coin-department job, and an early Chinese-coin education from his older brother.", "The conversation moves through punch-mark chronology, Kanishka dating, museum display design, the coin trade, UNESCO, Afghanistan hoards, and access for scholars from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, and Russia."]
Ashish Rai argues that the Red Fort court-martial of three INA officers on 5 November 1945 helped move Britain from dominion status toward Indian independence in 18 weeks.
Asian Studies Centre's interview with Dr.
Asian Studies Centre talks with Jan Lingen, a Netherlands-born building engineer and architect who became a South Asian coin collector after working in Delhi for the Netherlands Embassy in 1967-68.
PhD researcher Shreya Gupta interviews longtime collector Paul Stevens about how he began collecting Indian coins in the 1980s after his grandfather's example and a cheap catalogue of Victorian rupees from dealer Spink.
Shreya Gupta frames the interview around her EHRC-funded 'Decolonizing Collections' project, which tracks four collections of Indian coins at the Ashmolean Museum, the British Museum, and the Fitzwilliam Museum.
This episode explores Idi Amin's 1972 expulsion of Asians from Uganda, examining African leaders' responses and the broader geopolitical context.
An academic seminar at Oxford introducing Professor Sara Ansari, who presents a paper on agrarian reforms in 1940s-50s Sindh, Pakistan.
An academic seminar at Oxford introducing a guest speaker on South Asian international relations and nuclear disarmament.
An academic seminar introducing Professor Dilip Menon and his work on caste and subaltern studies in South India.
An academic lecture introducing a talk on Saudi Arabia under Mohammed bin Salman by a leading expert.