Organizer: Center for Khmer Studies
Type/Location: Hybrid / Krong Siem Reap, Cambodia
Description:
This hybrid event marks the official launch of the Khmer edition of Svay: A Khmer Village in Cambodia, the seminal ethnography by the late May Mayko Ebihara. The program will include brief remarks from scholars who contributed to its translation and publication.
About the Speakers:
Professor Judy Ledgerwood is a cultural anthropologist whose research interests include cultural change in the aftermath of violence, and new patterns of gender and social relations after the Cambodian revolution and war. She has conducted research in Cambodia and in the United States with Khmer Americans. She has taught at the Royal University of Fine Arts, Faculty of Archaeology in Phnom Penh; and has had senior research fellowships from the Center for Khmer Studies. Professor Ledgerwood has served on the board of the National Cambodian Heritage Museum and Killing Fields Memorial in Chicago. She retired from Northern Illinois University in 2024, where she had served as the Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies.
Professor Ledgerwood’s current book project is a history of Svay village from 1960-2020, building on May Ebihara’s classic work which is now available in translation. The new book uses research materials from her mentor May Ebihara, life history interviews they conducted together in the community in the 1990s, and subsequent research in the 2000s-2020s.
Dr. CHHOM Kunthea is a researcher at the Apsara National Authority (Authority for the Protection of the Site and the Management of the Region of Angkor) in Siem Reap. She received her MA degree in Sanskrit from Magadha University, Bodh-Gaya, Bihar, India, in 2008, and defended her PhD thesis entitled ‘The Role of Sanskrit in the development of the Khmer language: An epigraphic study from the 6th to the 14th centuries’ at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, in 2016, which was published in French in 2018.She co-edited the Khmer translated book of Svay working together with Prof. Michel Antelme.
Linna Sophea currently serves as Chief of the Planning Office in the Department of Planning and Statistics at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts. She graduated Bachelor’s degree in Archaeology from the Royal University of Fine Arts in 2015 and recently completed a Master’s degree in Cultural Anthropology at Northern Illinois University in 2023. Her thesis focused on the practice of Cambodian Buddhism in Chicagoland. In 2021, she assisted Dr. Judy Ledgerwood with a research project in Svay village, where she engaged in observation, participation, and interviews with Svay residents.”
Dr. Eve Zucker is a sociocultural anthropologist whose research focuses on recovery and social repair in the aftermath of mass violence, in Cambodia and beyond. Exploring how communities remember and grapple with the legacies of trauma, her work covers a range of recovery processes, from everyday practices to memorialization efforts in the digital realm. Dr. Zucker has written extensively on these topics a monograph, three edited volumes on related topics, and other publications. Dr. Zucker taught for several years at Yale and Columbia Universities and is currently a researcher and steering committee member of the Yale Genocide Program, where she co-founded the Digital Memorialization of Mass Atrocities program. She also serves as President of the Center for Khmer Studies.
About the Moderator:
Andrew Mertha is the George and Sadie Hyman Professor of China Studies, Director of the China Studies Program, and Director of the SAIS China Research Center at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). Mertha has served as the Vice Dean for Faculty Affairs and International Research Cooperation at SAIS. He is formerly a professor of Government at Cornell University and an assistant professor of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. Mertha is the author of Brothers in Arms: Chinese Aid to the Khmer Rouge, 1975-1979 (Cornell University Press, 2014) and the editor of May Ebihara’s Svay: A Cambodian Village, with an Introduction by Judy Ledgerwood (Cornell University Press/Cornell Southeast Asia Program Press, 2018). His latest book, Bad Lieutenants: The Khmer Rouge, United Front, and Class Struggle, 1970–1997, was published by Cornell University Press in May 2025 (open access/free download: https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501781018/bad-lieutenants/). Mertha is on the Editorial Committee for the Journal of Comparative Politics, and (formerly) The China Quarterly, and Asian Survey. He is vice president of the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS). Mertha received his PhD from the University of Michigan and is originally from New York City.
Registration:
To attend the event in person, please register here.
To attend the event online, please register here.