As the new academic year is fast approaching, the Society is programming an exciting line-up of lectures for the 2025-26 Lecture Series, which will commence in September. We are delighted to announce that one of the first lectures that opens the series will be delivered on Thursday, 18th September at 6.30pm BST by Nicolas Revire,…| Royal Asiatic Society
Every now and then I enjoy opening a random box on the shelf and get my teeth into something that is yet to be processed. Last week, as I was cataloguing some prints and drawings (more information in a previous blog post here), I found an item annotated ‘Chinese concertina book on rice and silk…| Royal Asiatic Society
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Recently catalogued artworks This week I have spent some time cataloguing our visual material. Those who have visited our Reading Room would probably have consulted our physical catalogue entitled Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings, Engravings and Busts in the Collection of the Royal Asiatic Society by Raymond Head. The illustrated catalogue was published in 1991 and…| Royal Asiatic Society
Some of you may have read the recent news that in the UNESCO World Heritage Committee meeting this month, the Maratha military landscapes of India have been inscribed as one of the 26 new World Heritage Sites. This new inscription concerns not a single site, but twelve major fortifications mostly in Maharashtra State, which were…| Royal Asiatic Society
The Society’s library recently received a kind donation from the Maharana of Mewar Charitable Foundation (MMCF) in Udaipur (Rajasthan, India) of its beautiful exhibition catalogue Picturing Place: Painted and Printed Maps at the Udaipur Court. This exhibition charts how visual representations of topography and territory in Udaipur were transformed during the 19th and early 20th centuries under British colonial influence. The introduction of new European map-making practices looms large in t...| Royal Asiatic Society
On Tuesday 10 December 2024, the Royal Asiatic Society was delighted to announce the launch of the annual James J. Busuttil Medal and Prize for the publication of a book on human rights, in English, preferably by someone within the first ten years of their academic career. Nominations are invited for books on human rights…| Royal Asiatic Society
We have had a few sweltering days in the Reading Room this week, but thankfully the weather has cooled off significantly, so it is a great relief. While the Society’s lecture programme is taking a recess over the summer months, we continue to be open for research visits. Indeed, summer tends to be the busier…| Royal Asiatic Society
The Royal Asiatic Society is pleased to award the 2025 James J. Busuttil Prize and Medal for Human Rights jointly to Dr Lydia Walker for States-in-Waiting: A Counternarrative of Global Decolonization (Cambridge University Press, 2024) and Dr Sandhya Fuchs for Fragile Hope: Seeking Justice for Hate Crimes in India, (Stanford University Press, 2024). Both books are exemplary works of early…| Royal Asiatic Society
The Society held a ceremony to award its inaugural Charles H. Norchi Prize yesterday evening. It was a joyful occasion filled with engaging discussions, celebrations and drinks, and the event was well-attended by friends of the Society, scholars in the field and other guests both in-person and online. The Society would particularly like to thank…| Royal Asiatic Society
This week a copy of the international edition of Revista de Cultura has arrived the Library, and will be added to the Society’s collection of academic journals. This issue of the journal is dedicated to Macao’s arts, history and culture, with contents tying in with the 250th anniversary of the birth of George Chinnery (1774-1852),…| Royal Asiatic Society
I am pleased to say that the catalogue for the Society’s Membership archive has now been published here. This collection forms part of the Society’s institutional archives, and contains mainly 20th-century material which is now housed in nine archival boxes. The collection is further divided into seven series in the catalogue for ease of navigation.…| Royal Asiatic Society
We are pleased to announce that the Society recently added eighteen manuscripts to its Digital Library. They include eleven manuscripts from the Malay collections, and a further seven from the Javanese collections. Together, they represent an important addition to the Society’s digital collections from maritime South East Asia. The Malay manuscripts have been digitized in…| Royal Asiatic Society
Collections Evening 2025 The Society held its annual Collections Evening last Friday (10 April). This year, we were pleased to host three presentations dedicated to different parts of the Society’s important manuscript collection. Before the presentations, Dr Edward Weech, RAS Librarian, gave a brief introduction on how scholarly focus in the field had increasingly concentrated…| Royal Asiatic Society
This week I’ve been working through more of the collections records. I’ve completed a first sort of all the physical material in the archives and have organised chronologically the material associated with the Society loaning items to other institutions for exhibitions, drawing together the papers already in the archive and those historical ones in the…| Royal Asiatic Society
