Celebrating 20 Years of OSGA

This year we are celebrating 20 years of OSGA. Professor Roger Goodman, Dr Shannon McKellar and Alexia Lewis, who were all there in the School’s early days share some of their recollections.

What was the original set-up for Area Studies at Oxford University?

Roger: Until 2000, Area Studies at Oxford were run by inter-faculty committees. However, following the publication of the North Commission in 2000, the entire structure was inverted. Independent Divisions were established and Faculties were changed into Departments. Suddenly, Departments were incentivised to increase their teaching load and research income.

However, the old inter-faculty committees were arbitrarily distributed between the Humanities and Social Sciences Divisions (Chinese and Middle Eastern Studies went to Humanities and Japanese, Latin American and Russian and East European Studies went to Social Sciences). It became clear that if something was not done very quickly, the activities of both Area Studies and Development Studies (which had also been run by inter-faculty committees) would be seriously dissipated. As a result, Laurence Whitehead, Rosemary Thorp and I decided to go and see the two heads of the new Divisions, who immediately understood our concerns. A new Department for Area and Development Studies (ADS) was set up in the Social Sciences Division in 2002, with Lawrence Whitehead as its first Head. In 2004, it was decided that ADS should split into two separate departments, which subsequently came to be known as SIAS and ODID.

What reputation did Area Studies have in universities at this time?

Roger: Not many of the research-intensive universities had Area Studies programmes, but many of the new universities did. I think the truth is that Area Studies departments had a pretty poor reputation and were not seen as very academically robust, especially by the disciplinary departments which tended to look down on them. Area Studies departments in US universities, even the large and extremely well-funded one at Harvard, particularly faced this prejudice.

Early days in the new Area Studies department  

Roger: I was in Japan on sabbatical when the two departments were created out of ADS and I received an email from Donald Hay, the Head of Social Sciences, asking if I would consider being the Inaugural Head of the new Area Studies Department. I came back in April 2004 to discover that we had been given 12 Bevington Road - which was in a very grotty state (the University had been planning on selling it) - and that it was planned that the new Department would come into being in October of that year. We immediately advertised for a Department Administrator and appointed Shannon Stephen (now Shannon McKellar, Senior Tutor at St Anne’s College). Then a small group of us from ADS, who identified with Area rather than Development Studies, held a series of meetings to decide what we were going to do!

Shannon: There were several obstacles we had to overcome when setting up the School. Getting the different centres to love each other and the School was a challenge! Deciding on the paint colour for 12 Bevington Road took some time… did we go for Apple White in the end or a warmer white?! The biggest debate was around what to call the School – that was a bit of a bun fight! Never in my life did I learn so much as I did then about the pros, cons and local and international politics of putting ‘School’ next to ‘Interdisciplinary’ next to ‘Area Studies’.

Alexia: I think there were only four of us rattling around in 12 Bevington Rd for my first few months. When I joined in October 2004 as Shannon’s assistant, I did HR, Finance, Grants, Buildings and Health and Safety over three days a week. It was the busiest I’ve ever been! A funny moment was when Roger came in to my office to sign something and he remarked that he could barely recognise his own signature he was signing so much! I’m really proud to have been in at the start of SIAS/OSGA and help shape the way as it’s built up over the years into a fantastic department.

Roger: I remember spending a lot of the summer of 2004 trying to persuade everybody I knew in the different Interfaculty Area Studies groupings who had not been part of ADS to move partly onto the payroll of the new School so that we could get to a critical mass of members by the time we opened. Most who were approached though did eventually decide to join the payroll of the new School; one result of this was that when we opened in October 2004, our annual budget for the year showed a deficit of £800,000! The early years of SIAS, therefore, were largely focussed on creating income streams which would reduce (and eventually eliminate) this deficit.

From the beginning, and encouraged by the Head of Division, we looked at developing new income streams from master’s programmes; over the first five or so years, we set up many new area studies master’s programmes and greatly increased the number of fee-paying master’s students. A lot of effort also went into increasing research income. Over the next few years, the deficit began to go down.

We did face some prejudices in the early days. For example, some of the older colleges could be a little stuffy about taking students from our new master’s. There was also a definite bias against interdisciplinary area research proposals, and we fought quite a big battle with the research councils, especially the ESRC, to convince them that this was wrong. I am glad to say that overtime both of these prejudices seem to have disappeared. Shannon: My strongest memory of the early days is of all the brave pioneers! I’m proud that I played a small part of the start of a ground-breaking, now thriving, world-leading Oxford School of Global and Area Studies.

Key principles of the new School

Roger: We signed up to a number of key ‘School principles’ from the beginning.

One was a principle of limited but transparent cross-subsidy between the units because we believed that SIAS collectively would always only be as good as its ‘weakest’ unit. It was a good principle that underscored that we were a single School, not just a set of units that happened to share a home. The major beneficiary of this in the early years was African Studies.

Another principle was that the master’s courses should have a shared, compulsory research methods programme, and that methods should be taken seriously - again to differentiate ourselves from Area Studies programmes elsewhere.

We were also very clear from the beginning that any of our master’s programmes that worked on regions with so-called ‘difficult’ languages should include language training; we felt, for example, that it should not be possible to get a master’s in Japanese studies from the University of Oxford if one could not use original Japanese sources.

It was an exciting time establishing these founding principles from scratch. We had a great Head of Division, Donald Hay, who gave us time and space and the other departments, especially DPIR, were very generous in setting up joint appointments and supportive of our general aims.

In what ways has OSGA changed most over the 20 years?

Roger: One significant change was the School’s name moving from SIAS to OSGA; another was the establishment of a doctoral

programme.

A more subtle change was that the School was gradually unable to maintain the principle of joint appointments; they became too complicated and time-consuming to negotiate and increasingly appointments were made that were SIAS/OSGA only. A further change was the huge growth in postdoctoral researchers and department lecturers. We had almost none at the beginning.

What are the highlights of the last 20 years for you?

Roger:

• In 2005 we convened a two-day Oxford Conference entitled ‘The Future of Interdisciplinary Area Studies.’ We invited leading experts in Area Studies, and asked a number of high-profile individuals to address the conference from various walks of life - NGOs, charities, the media, government, diplomacy, industry - and tell us what their sectors wanted from Area Studies. A key outcome was that the ESRC and the AHRC decided they would fund a Language-Based Area Studies Programme. This was the biggest injection of funding into Area Studies that the UK had seen since the 1980s, with funding for four ‘centres of excellence’ in Chinese Studies, Japanese Studies, Arabic Studies and Eastern European Studies. Oxford was awarded Chinese Studies and (together with UCL and Birmingham University) Russian and East European Studies. As a direct consequence, national awareness around Area Studies was raised significantly and SIAS subsequently became identified as probably the lead institution in the UK.
• Area Studies has been an absolute powerhouse in every Research Evaluation Framework (REF) and RAE since it was set up. In terms of research power, it has come around the top every time since it was established. I believe it has also been ranked number one in the world in some of the QS rankings.
• We managed to rationalise the master’s courses in Japanese, Chinese and Middle Eastern Studies into a more coherent set of programmes that joined together Humanities and Social Studies) or in Social Sciences (SIAS). This was very confusing, and students could, and did, end up on the wrong programme.
• Another great success was the China Centre, which was founded in 2008 and relocated to St Hugh’s College in 2014. This brought together all colleagues in Chinese studies, who had previously been split across multiple sites, into one building. Similarly, colleagues in Japanese studies, who used to be split between the Nissan Institute and the Oriental Institute, are now all housed together in the former.
• Finally, it was quite pleasing when we finally went into the black! OSGA now operates with a healthy surplus and successive Heads of School as well as successive Heads of Administration and Finance should all take huge credit for bringing that about. It’s fantastic to see how far the School has come in 20 years.

What do you hope for OSGA going forwards?

Roger:

• The most important thing is to retain incredibly high academic standards; if they are allowed to slip at all, it will be very difficult to get them back up again.
• I have always felt we could do better in developing joint projects with colleagues in Medical Sciences and Natural Sciences; for example, exploring issues around health systems, environmental challenges and the nature of scientific research more generally.
• I recently dug up some papers from the late 1970s, outlining a proposal to set up a Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, which made the same arguments as to why Oxford would be the best place for such a centre that we are making today. It would be fantastic to see that vision realised.