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This website is no longer active but remains online as an archive of the work of the Asian Migrations Research Theme, which ran between 2012 and 2016. Some of its work has been succeeded by the Centre for Global Migrations.

Go to the Centre for Global Migrations website.


Asian Migrations Research Theme Steering Committee

Here are the Asian Migrations Research Theme Steering Committee Members, 2013-2014

Steering Committee Members are all based at the University of Otago, Aotearoa/New Zealand

Tara Duncan, Lecturer, Department of Tourism

Research interests include: young budget travellers, current debates on (im)mobility, mobile methodologies, everyday spaces and practices of tourism, hospitality and leisure.

For additional information please go to her webpage

Gautam Ghosh, Lecturer in Social Anthropology, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Research interests include: Social & Cultural Theory, Religion & Politics, Cyberia, Time and Space, Anthropology and History, Migration and Multiculturalism, R.G. Collingwood, Music, South Asia, Australasia, North America.

For additional information please go to his webpage

Susan Heydon, Senior Lecturer, School of Pharmacy

Research interests include: Changing patterns of medicines use, the place of medicines in primary healthcare services both in international/global and New Zealand contexts, medicines and migration, and medicines in the context of people's lives. Dr Heydon has a particular interest in Nepal and the Himalayan region.

For additional information please go to her webpage

Doug Hill, Senior Lecturer in Development Studies, Geography Department

Research interests include: South Asia (especially India), Geopolitics and Transboundary Water Resources, Migrant Labour, Rural Development and participatory governance in West Bengal, Urban transformation and Socio-Spatial segregation in India's megacities.

For additional information please go to his webpage

Roy Starrs, Associate Professor, Japanese Programme Coordinator

Research interests include: Japanese literature, culture and intellectual history, comparative literature and culture. Shinto and Buddhism in Japanese literature, a comparative study of Buddhist and Christian mysticism, expressionism in Japanese and Western modernist art.

For additional information please go to his webpage

Glenn Summerhayes, Professor, Department of Anthropology and Archaeology

Research interests include: Pacific archaeology, in particular Melanesia, the archaeology of trade and exchange, the development of social complexity, the archaeology of East Asia, archaeometry, cultural heritage management, and archaeology and the school curriculum in Papua New Guinea.

For additional information please go to his webpage

Will Sweetman, Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions, Department of Theology and Religion

Research interests include: interactions between the religions of Asia and the West in the modern period, accounts of Hinduism in English, Dutch, German and French writers from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg's works on Hinduism, in particular the Genealogie der malabarischen Götter (1713), Jesuit missionary writing on Asian religions.

For additional information please go to his webpage

Paola Voci, Programme Coordinator and Senior Lecturer, Chinese Programme

Research interests include: East Asian Studies (in particular, Chinese language and culture), film and media studies, and visual culture. Dr Voci's recent research has focused on documentary film/videomaking in contemporary China and the media of the Chinese diaspora.

For additional information please go to her webpage

Vanessa Ward, Lecturer in East Asian History, Department of History and Art History

Research interests include: modern Japanese history, with a particular interest in post-WWII Japanese intellectual life and publishing culture, the thought and contribution of a Japanese woman, Cho Takeda Kiyoko (1917–), to post-WWII intellectual life, and the publishing history of the Japanese intellectual group, Shiso no kagaku kenkyu kai. In recent publications she has explored Cho Takeda Kiyoko's approach to feminist thought and her efforts to improving relations between Japan and its Asian neighbours in the postwar era. Her areas of research supervision include publishing culture, Japanese pacifism, and publishing history.

For additional information please go to her webpage

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