Épisodes

  • Crossing Musical Boundaries with the ADAM Quartet and Vinthya Perinpanathan

    Crossing Musical Boundaries with the ADAM Quartet and Vinthya Perinpanathan
    Sep 25 2025
    This episode features a conversation with Vinthya Perinpanathan and members of the ADAM Quartet about musical exchange and artistic collaboration across genres and histories. The ADAM Quartet is a young string quartet consisting of Minna Svedberg (viola), Margot Kolodziej (violin), Julia Kleinsmann (violin), and Renée Timmer (cello). The group formed in Amsterdam and has performed at major venues and festivals in The Netherlands. Besides playing the traditional string quartet repertoire, ADAM regularly collaborates with contemporary composers working in other musical styles and disciplines. One such composer is this episode's fifth guest, Vinthya Perinpanathan. Trained in Western-Classical music, Vinthya has begun exploring Sri Lankan and South Asian music in her ​​compositions as well. This month, ADAM releases its debut album called Exquisite Corpse, and in January, the string quartet will play a new piece composed by Perinpanathan. In their conversation, and through several audio examples, the ADAM Quartet and Vinthya discuss new music collaborations as well as the importance and challenges of ​combining different musical traditions.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    50 min
  • Beijing Sound Art Museum with Colin Chinnery

    Beijing Sound Art Museum with Colin Chinnery
    Aug 28 2025

    This episode features a conversation on Beijing's urban soundscape with Colin Chinnery, an artist and curator based in China. Chinnery is a co-founder of Sound Art Museum in Beijing. This museum opened to the public in 2023, and it offers visitors a history of the city through sounds. Sound Art Museum is an immersive space, which also features natural soundscapes, languages, and music from around the world. In today’s episode, Colin discusses the importance of sound for knowing and understanding a city, while listening to different examples of recordings from old and new Beijing. Colin talks about his journey to create this 6000-square-meter space, his plans for the museum, and the value and significance of careful listening.

    The recording of Xin Fengxia singing "Liu Qiao’er" comes courtesy of the Chinese Database for Traditional Music. The song "On a Mound" by the band Xue Wei was provided by Colin Chinnery. All other audio clips and field recordings included in this episode are courtesy of Sound Art Museum. In addition to a short excerpt included in the conversation, the episode concludes with the full song《都塔尔弹唱》being performed on the dutar by Abdulla Majnun.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    1 h et 17 min
  • The Division of Vietnam (Guest Episode: Nam Phong Dialogues)

    The Division of Vietnam (Guest Episode: Nam Phong Dialogues)
    Jul 24 2025
    On this episode of The Channel, we’re featuring a full episode from our friends over at the Nam Phong Dialogues podcast. Nam Phong Dialogues is hosted by two Vietnamese American scholars, and the show excels at presenting Vietnamese intellectual and sociopolitical history in ways that are accessible, engaging, and relevant for understanding contemporary global issues. The two co-hosts are Kevin Pham and Yen Vu. Kevin Pham is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Amsterdam. His first book, The Architects of Dignity: Vietnamese Visions of Decolonization, was published last year by Oxford University Press. Yen Vu is a Faculty Member in Literature at Fulbright University Vietnam in Ho Chi Minh City, and she is currently a Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Amsterdam during Summer 2025. In this episode of Nam Phong Dialogues, Yen and Kevin discuss the historical division of Vietnam following the end of the French colonial period, including the massive migrations that it spurred.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    55 min
  • South Asian Games with Jacob Schmidt-Madsen

    South Asian Games with Jacob Schmidt-Madsen
    Jun 26 2025
    This episode features a discussion with Jacob Schmidt-Madsen about Game Studies and the history of South Asian board games. Jacob is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He earned his PhD in Indology in 2019 from the University of Copenhagen, where he still remains an Affiliated External Researcher. His work focuses on the history, structure, and cultural significance of board games in South Asia, and his dissertation explored the Indian origins of the modern children’s game “Snakes and Ladders.” In Berlin, he is continuing this work as part of the research group Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia (ASTRA), headed by Anuj Misra. His project within that group explores the cosmological and astrological dimensions to play and games in South Asia, specifically through the examination and translation of three encyclopedic texts. In the following discussion, we chat about the ideological and cultural significance of games, exploring the importance of play both as a key domain of experience and as an object of academic study.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    1 h et 1 min
  • Indigo Across Borders with Aarti Kawlra, Jody Benjamin, Min-Chin Chiang, and Jocelyne Vokouma

    Indigo Across Borders with Aarti Kawlra, Jody Benjamin, Min-Chin Chiang, and Jocelyne Vokouma
    May 29 2025

    This episode features Aarti Kawlra, Academic Director of the Humanities Across Borders program at IIAS, hosting discussion about indigo with three colleagues, scholars, and educators. Jody Benjamin is an Associate Professor of History at Howard University. His recent book is The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700-1850 (Ohio University Press, New African History Series, 2024), which explores questions of state-making, social hierarchy, and self-making across parts of Mali, Senegal, and Guinea through the lens of textiles and dress in a context shaped by an emergent global capitalism, slavery, and colonialism. Min-Chin Chiang is an Associate Professor and the Chairperson of the Graduate Institute of Architecture and Cultural Heritage in Taipei National University of the Arts. Her work focuses on heritage craft, heritage education, and heritage dynamics in relation to community and colonialism. Finally, Jocelyne Vokouma is a researcher in the Department of Socioeconomics and Development Anthropology at the Institute of Social Studies (Institut des Sciences des Sociétés / INSS-CNRST) in Burkina Faso, where she specializes in the aesthetics of indigo in clothing.


    Indigo occupies a haloed place as a color, a craft, and a hi(story) of global interactions. Viewed largely as a dye-yielding plant with a specific chemistry and exchange value as a commodity, in this podcast, the guests focus on indigo as a tool for African and Asian self-consciousness. Brought to you ahead of the Africa-Asia ConFest to be held next month (June 2025) in Dakar, this episode centers on indigo as a livelihood practice and techno-cultural knowhow, taking two specific examples, namely, indigo in Taiwan and indigo in Burkina Faso.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    1 h et 21 min
  • Curating the Africa-Asia ConFest with Laura Erber, Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy, Chương-Đài Võ, and Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo

    Curating the Africa-Asia ConFest with Laura Erber, Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy, Chương-Đài Võ, and Fábio Baqueiro Figueiredo
    May 28 2025
    This episode of the podcast is a special discussion connected to our upcoming event, Africa–Asia: A New Axis of Knowledge, which will take place in Dakar from June 11-14. Because not everyone will be able to join us in person, we thought it would be meaningful to bring you some of the conversations and ideas that have inspired this third edition of the event – previously held in Ghana (2015) and Tanzania (2018). In anticipation of the event, Laura Erber speaks with three guests about the Conference-Festival model and some of the key themes and ideas that inspire it. In different ways, each of the three guests approach their work in a way that embodies the transregional and culturally engaged dimensions of the event. First, Fatima Bintou Rassoul Sy is Director of Programs at RAW Material Company in Dakar. Second, Chương-Đài Võ is an independent curator and professor at the École Supérieure d’Art in Paris-Cergy, and she is also the lead curator of the ConFest artistic program. Finally, Fabio Baqueiro Figueiredo is an historian and professor at the Federal University of Bahia in Salvador, Brazil. Together, they have an interdisciplinary conversation about festivals, conferences, and cultural events rooted in the Global South – especially those inspired by the idea of non-alignment. We’ll look at historical milestones like the 1955 Bandung Conference and FESTAC 77, as well as more recent initiatives, to reflect on how such gatherings create space for cultural, political, and social expression outside dominant power structures – and what kind of genuine alternatives they might offer today in different contexts.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    1 h et 39 min
  • Architectural Encounters in the Asia Pacific with Zhengfeng Wang, Amanda Achmadi, Paul Walker, and Soon-Tzu Speechley

    Architectural Encounters in the Asia Pacific with Zhengfeng Wang, Amanda Achmadi, Paul Walker, and Soon-Tzu Speechley
    Apr 24 2025

    In this episode, current IIAS Research Fellow Zhengfeng Wang hosts a conversation on transregional architectural history in the Asia-Pacific. She is joined by Amanda Achmadi, Paul Walker, and Soon-Tzu Speechley, all from the University of Melbourne. The three guests recently co-edited the volume Architectural Encounters in Asia Pacific: Built Traces of Intercolonial Trade, Industry and Labour, 1800s-1950s, published by Bloomsbury in 2024).


    Amanda Achmadi is an Associate Professor in Architectural Design, specializing in Asian Architecture and Urbanism. Her work examines the intersections of architecture and identity politics across pre-colonial, colonial, and postcolonial periods, with a particular focus on Indonesia and the broader Southeast Asian region. Amanda was previously a Research Fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in 2010. Paul Walker is a Professor of Architecture whose recent research delves into mid-20th-century architecture in Australia and New Zealand, contemporary museum architecture, and colonial museum buildings in Australia, New Zealand, and India. Finally, Soon-Tzu Speechley is a Lecturer in Urban and Cultural Heritage. His research interests include the reception of classical architecture in colonial Malaya, architectural networks within the British Empire, and Southeast Asian heritage.

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    1 h et 4 min
  • Chiang Mai between Empire and Modern Thailand (Guest Episode: Southeast Asia Crossroads)

    Chiang Mai between Empire and Modern Thailand (Guest Episode: Southeast Asia Crossroads)
    Mar 27 2025
    On this episode of The Channel, we’re bringing you a full episode from our friends over at Southeast Asia Crossroads, a podcast from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. We at IIAS have frequently crossed paths with members of the team behind Southeast Asia Crossroads, and we’ve long wanted to do re-post one of their episodes on our feed. A perfect opportunity arose when an episode from last September featured Taylor Easum for a group discussion of his latest book, Chiang Mai between Empire and Modern Thailand: A City in the Colonial Margins. Easum is an Associate Professor of History at Indiana State University, and as some of you may know, the book under discussion is part of our “Asian Cities” book series, published by IIAS and Amsterdam University Press. As you’ll hear, the podcast features rigorous, engaging, but also fun discussions on a wide array of topics pertaining to the Southeast Asia, so we encourage our listeners to go and subscribe to Southeast Asia Crossroads!

    Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
    Voir plus Voir moins
    54 min