skip to content

Default style

increase size

increase contrast

Keynote Speakers

Mr Aitzaz Ahsan, MA (Cantab); Gray's Inn (Barrister-at-Law); Senior Advocate Supreme Court; Member National Assembly of Pakistan.

'The lawyer who turned a judge into a national cause'

Aitzaz Ahsan has been described with these glowing words for his recent defence of Mr. Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry, Chief Justice of Pakistan in a Reference (an indictment) filed by the President before the Supreme Judicial Council of Pakistan. He also successfully represented him before the Supreme Court in a petition seeking the setting aside of that Reference The release of Pakistan's Chief Justice was been a major turning point in Pakistan's assertion of the power and validity of a civil society. Within weeks of the Chief Justice's re-instatement in July 2007, the Supreme Court released Javed Hashmi, one of Pakistan's most important opposition leaders imprisoned since 2004. Ahsan is presently also the counsel, in the Supreme Court, for Mukhtar Mai, the victim of the gang-rape that was allegedly sanctioned by a village council.

These important legal battles for the defence of civil society come after many years of defending scores of political prisoners in military court trials under martial law, including trials held by military courts in camera inside such jails as the forbidding mediaeval Attock Fort built by Emperor Akbar in the 16th century. Aitaz Ahsan was the only attorney to represent both former Prime Ministers of Pakistan, Ms. Benazir Bhutto and Mr. Nawaz Sharif, thus straddling the intense political divide in Pakistan.

Aitzaz Ahsan, is without doubt, one of Pakistan's leading constitutional and human rights attorneys. A Minister in various Pakistani cabinets, he is also admired as the author of several books including a co-authored work 'Divided on Democracy' (Meghnad Desai and Aitzaz Ahsan. New Delhi: Roli, 2005).

Download curriculum vitae of Mr Aitzaz Ahsan

Geremie R. Barmé

Worrying China & New Sinology (Word Document, 104Kb)

Geremie R. Barmé is an historian, cultural critic, filmmaker and web archivist who works on Chinese cultural and intellectual history from the early modern period (1600s) to the present.

His latest books include Sang Ye’s oral history of contemporary China, China Candid: the people on the People’s Republic (University of California Press, 2006) and The Great Wall of China, edited with Claire Roberts (Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, 2006) and The Forbidden City (London: Profile Books and Harvard University Press, 2008). His latest film, Morning Sun (2003) which he co-produced, co-wrote and co-directed with Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon of the Long Bow Group in Boston, won the American Historical Association’s 2004 John E. O’Connor Award.

He is a research professor and Australian Research Council Federation Fellow with College of Asian & Pacific Studies, The Australian National University, Canberra, where he has recently co-founded The ANU China Institute and where he also edits the journal East Asian History and the online China Heritage Quarterly.

New Sinology and Worrying About China

China Institute, The Australian National University

Plenary Address at the Asian Studies Association of Australia 1-3 July 2008

In the context of the theme of the conference ‘Is this the Asian Century?’ this talk will further advance the idea of ‘New Sinology’ by engaging with Gloria Davies’ work on ‘worrying about China’.

Further Reading

• Davies asks “Should we worry about Chinese patriotism?”
• Australian PM Speech at Peking University on 9 April 2008 (English version)
• Australian PM Speech at Peking University on 9 April 2008 (Chinese version)
• Professor Barme's analysis of the Australian PM speech as published in Sydney Morning Herald 12 April 2008
• Assoc Prof Gloria Davies book blurb for Worrying about China, The Language of Chinese Critical Inquiry, Harvard University Press, 2007.

Professor Hongkui Deng

Professor Hongkui Deng is regarded as one of China’s leading stem cell scientists. Trained in the USA, he returned to China in 2001 as the Cheung Kong Scholar Professor at Peking University where he remains today.

He is best known for the development of stem cells that can produce natural insulin – a critical innovation given the rising incidence of diabetes throughout the Asian region. He is also undertaking research on HIV, hepatitis C and SARS vaccines, again using stem cells to test ideas about cause and effect.

At the ASAA conference Professor Hongkui Deng will speak about how stem cell research can help contain diseases in Asia and how China has emerged so quickly as a leading centre for biotechnology research.

Readers of this note are encouraged to look at various websites about Professor Hongkui Deng such as Nature Medicine - 12, 262 (2006)

Professor Hendrik Maier

Luce Professor of Southeast Asian Studies, Department of Comparative Literature and Languages,
University of California, Riverside.

Maier’s research may be described as a search for workable concepts in which to ground Southeast Asian cultural practice from the pre-modern era to the post-colonial period. His first book, (In the Center of Authority: The Malay Hikayat Merong Mahawangsa, Cornell UP 1988), is a critical approach to Malay historiography in which he negotiates a number of interpretative conventions established in indigenous and colonial scholarship. His most recent book, We Are Playing Relatives: A Survey of Malay Writing (KITLV 2004), is the culmination of more than two decades of research and thinking about Malay writing. The book has attracted great interest and comment for its application of a theoretical model derived from Bakhtin to almost four centuries of Malay writing. Professor Maier’s work on Malaya writing crosses the national boundaries that currently define the politics of Southeast Asian region

Dr Sudha Nair

Program Director, Biodiversity
M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, India.

Sudha Nair is Program Director, Biodiversity at the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation and is involved in coordinating microbial diversity assessment studies. She is also involved in mobilizing science and technology for the empowerment of women. She serves as a member of various national and international committees which promotes gender equity through S&T. She is one of the Regional Advisory Members of such a netwrok, GEST, with UNESCO/UNDP and has been actively associated with this in last 6 years. She was the convenor and presently serves as one of the Governing Body members and Scientific Advisory Committee for the first Women’s Biotech Park Chennai. Her interests include promotion of eco-entrepreneurship among women and IPR related issues. She was the awardee of the Women Bioscientist award in 2002 from the Ministry of Science and Technology. Her Ph.D. in microbiology is from the University of Madras, India.

Dai Qing

China's water crisis

Dai Qing, has been one of China's most vocal advocates for the development of a sustainable water policy. Best known for her frank views on the Three Gorges Dam, she is equally concerned about the water crisis in China's cities and villages. As a resident of Beijing, one of her current questions is: how will Beijing respond to the water needs of the Olympic Games? Her insights on China's water are no less relevant to the rest of Asia, especially India - home to the world's 2nd largest population after China.

Read the article

Professor Anthony Reid

Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore

Anthony Reid is a Southeast Asian Historian at the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore, of which he was founding Director (2002-7). He was Professor of History and Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at UCLA from 1999-2002, and previously Professor of Southeast Asian History at the School of Pacific and Asian Studies in the Australian National University. He has worked on a variety of themes in the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of Southeast Asia, particularly in Indonesia. His books include An Indonesian Frontier: Acehnese and other histories of Sumatra (2004), Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia (1999), Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680 (2 vols. 1988-1993), The Blood of the People: Revolution and the End of Traditional Rule in Northern Sumatra (1979), The Indonesian National Revolution, 1945-1950 (1974), and The Contest for North Sumatra (1969).

Professor Ranabir Samaddar, from Kolkata in India.

Prof. Ranabir SAMADDAR, a founder of the CALCUTTA RESEARCH GROUP (CRG)and its journal, Refugee Watch, was earlier a professor of South Asia Studies, and subsequently the founder-Director of the Peace Studies Programme at the South Asia Forum for Human Rights, Kathmandu.

He has been a visiting professor to various universities including the Columbia University Institute of Scholars (Paris) and also worked for various UN committees - since 2001 he has been the head of a UNHCR research group on institutional practices of refugee care and protection in India. His publications largely concern themselves with issues about democracy, nationalism, human rights, refugees and minorities.

See for example

• Co-authored with Stefano Bianchini, Sanjay Chaturvedi, and Rada Ivekovic) Partitions – Reshaping States and Minds (London and New York: Frank Cass, 2005)
• Politics of Dialogue – Living Under the Geopolitical Histories of War and Peace (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004)
• In the Time of Nationalism – Political Essays on Bangladesh (Dhaka: University Press Limited, 2002)

Extracted from a full biography to be found at: http://www.mcrg.ac.in/rs.htm