Home - South Asian Studies

Oxford University has a rich history of engaging with South Asia as a region. Prominent South Asians – from freedom fighters to Prime Ministers to Nobel prize winners to some of the most brilliant minds the world has seen – have studied in Oxford and continue to engage with the University long after they have left.

The Centre for South Asian Studies (CSAS) comprises various permanent academic members of staff, as well as teaching assistants, post-doctoral fellows, research associates, and a permanent administrator. It holds expertise in contemporary subjects and concerns of South Asia as a region. We have particularly strong expertise in Indian foreign policy, the state, and climate change concerns; Pakistani politics; and the question of what the move to the digital is doing to South Asia.

Since 2008, the Centre for South Asian Studies has delivered world class postgraduate education with a focus on the contemporary societies, polities, economies and foreign relations of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Afghanistan, and the Indian Ocean islands. Our hundreds of graduates are today working as diplomats, politicians, scholars, lawyers, policy analysts, journalists, novelists and more – many of them in and on South Asia.

CSAS administers the 9-month MSc in Modern South Asian Studies and 21-month MPhil in Modern South Asian Studies courses (both of which are run in conjunction with the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies). Students on each of these courses will have the opportunity to engage with and be taught by scholars from both the Humanities and Social Science Divisions. CSAS also participates in the new Area Studies DPhil programme. 

CSAS has a growing post-doctoral community. We also host occasional visiting scholars; recent research projects have included Masculinity in Indian Cinema, Gender in South Asia and Sports as Soft Power Diplomacy in South Asia. In 2020 we welcomed the inaugural cohort of Rangoonwala Visiting Fellows from Pakistan.

We collaborate with the Faculties of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and History, the Ashmolean Museum and the Oxford Department of International Development on the Modern South Asian Studies seminar series which is hosted by St Antony's College and administered by the Asian Studies Centre. The MSAS seminars run weekly in term and are the central academic event focused on the region for the entire University of Oxford. In addition, we organise a range of academic conferences and networking events. We run occasional Chatham House style events with closed invitation lists that enable students to ask more penetrating/revealing questions. Other events we organise include tours of the Oxford Ashmolean Museum with a South Asia theme, termly Documentary Discussion evenings, with presentations by the director and, in conjunction with Wolfson College, the Annual Sarfraz Pakistan Lecture.