CO-OP

Ashley Thompson

Ashley Thompson (BA Harvard, MA Université de Paris 3, PhD Université de Paris 8) is Hiram W Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London. She maintains a sustained research focus on premodern Cambodian arts and literatures, and complements this with more punctual work on the contemporary period and the arts of the larger Southeast Asian region. Her research is informed by deconstruction and psychoanalysis, and revolves around questions of memory, political and cultural transition, embodiment, sexual difference and subjectivity. Explicitly decolonizing critical perspectives play a role in more recent work. Objects of analysis include Hindu and Buddhist sculpture, cult or ritual practices and texts, as well as other forms of fine and performing arts. Recent books include Engendering the Buddhist State: Territory, Sovereignty and Sexual Difference in the Inventions of Angkor (Routledge Critical Buddhist Studies, 2016) and two edited volumes, Early Theravadin Cambodia: Perspectives from Art and Archaeology (NUS Press, 2022) and The Routledge Handbook of Theravada Buddhism (2022). She also leads a number of publication initiatives including a book series with NUS Press: Art and Archaeology of Southeast Asia: Hindu-Buddhist Traditions.

Professor Thompson’s explorations of sculptural embodiment of memory and its loss, as of subjectivity and its challenges articulated in Southeast Asian religious traditions, have evolved in relation to professional practice in the field of cultural heritage protection. From 1988-1990 she worked in a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand, where she first glimpsed the profound attachment to territory embodied by cultural artefacts on either side of a troubled border. As the militarized border came to block the flow of people, it facilitated that of stolen antiquities, with brokers and buyers in far-off lands willingly blinded to the human suffering the loss reflected and further entailed. From 1994-2001 she taught at the Royal University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh, and worked in the Cabinet of Vann Molyvann, State Minister for Culture and Fine Arts, Urban Planning and Construction. During this time she was instrumental in developing the Cambodian university curricular and governmental frameworks for the protection of cultural heritage which are now ensuring the return of looted materials under the leadership of Cambodian cultural heritage experts. She has recently joined the international Restitution Team of archaeologists, art historians, conservators, curators and legal experts working with the Cambodian Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts on the ongoing restitution of illicitly trafficked Cambodian antiquities. 

As Principal Investigator of CO-OP, she is keen to channel her academic and professional experience to nurturing collective research on the dynamic local epistemologies underpinning Restitution. She believes that furthering understandings of Southeast Asian concepts and practices concerning the life and death of objects can facilitate more equitable, creative exchange in local, national, regional and international arenas.