Travel Awards 2025
We received almost 100 submissions, both academic and non-academic, for the 2025 Travel Awards, from applicants at twenty-four different institutions, covering a wide range of countries and topics including history, politics, culture, technology and society. We are delighted to announce four awards. They are:
Natasha Lock
Natasha is a PhD candidate at King’s College London. She holds a BA in History, International Relations and Mandarin from the University of Exeter, and a Masters from Peking University. She has lived, worked and studied in China for more than five years. She is researching Chinese media uses of visual images in coverage of the Fukushima wastewater release to portray Japan as a strategic enemy .
James Chapman
James graduated in Archaeology & Anthropology at Oxford and co- founded Project Amu Darya. Inspired by Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices of Chernobyl, James will collect an oral history of the forced displacement of the Yaghnobi community by Soviet troops in the early 1970s. By interviewing those who lived through this traumatic period, and engaging with their descendants, he hopes to preserve their stories for future generations and uncover the long-term impacts on Yaghnobi culture.
Paloma Mauriès
Paloma has a BA in Politics and International Relations from SOAS and is studying for an MPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford. Her research will look into how and why the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) curriculum policy changed between the Oslo Accords and the present, what these changes entailed, and how this shapes UNRWA refugee curriculum policy today.
Adonis L
Adonis is a Lecturer in East Asian History at the School of Humanities and Heritage, University of Lincoln, where he specialises in the twentieth-century history of Hong Kong, China, and their links with the world, especially Sino-British relations. This project will turn his doctoral research on the international, regional, and local dimensions of the Kowloon-Canton Railway into a book.
Helping young people with a passionate interest in Asia is at the heart of the RSAA’s mission. We congratulate them all and look forward to the results of their research.
