Professor Michael Leifer and the Asia Research Centre
Summary provided by Michael Yahuda, Professor Emeritus, London School of Economics Visiting Scholar, Sigur Center of Asian Studies Elliott School for International Affairs George Washington University.
Professor Michael Leifer, the founder and first director of the LSE’s Asia Research Centre, was one of the world’s leading authorities on Asia and especially on Southeast Asia. He was a teacher of international repute and, in a career spanning more than forty years, he had taught and supervised many of the people who subsequently became leading figures in business, politics and contemporary scholarship throughout Southeast Asia. He had published and edited more than twenty books and innumerable scholarly articles and book chapters on all the themes of political importance in Southeast Asia. Leifer professed International Relations, but he was also an expert on the politics and social developments of the countries of the region. Professor Leifer brought to the Centre his enormous prestige as a scholar and a teacher.
Michael Leifer had a wide range of connections in Asia, the UK, Europe and the USA and he was able to draw on them in support of the Centre especially in its crucial early days. Possessed of great charm and a wonderfully sharp sense of humour, Michael Leifer was able to draw on the large range of expertise on Asia within the School, even though the experts were dispersed among the different academic disciplines. One of the features of his leadership was to persuade colleagues to offer seminars on themes of general interest, which he then collected and edited as books. The Centre also benefitted from Michael Leifer’s great administrative skills and experience. He had served as Pro-Director of the School for four years – the highest office open to academics. Prior to that he had also been Convenor of the International Relations Department for three years.
The appeal of Michael Leifer spanned the generations and those tied to different schools of thought. Although he had his own well thought out approach to the study of Politics and International Relations, on which he would not waver, he was always willing to encourage students and junior colleagues who followed different schools of thought. At the same time he relished intellectual argument with the great and with his own students. Although he established the Centre in the last few years of his life, he was unstinting in his enthusiasm for it and in the work he put into making it an important Centre within the School and the wider world.
