SOAS, University of London (The School of Oriental and African Studies)

Overview

Department of the History of Art and Archaeology

Senior Teaching Fellow

Name:

Dr Peter D. Sharrock

Email address:

ps56@soas.ac.uk

Telephone:

0207 435 8819

Fax:

020 7898 4699

Address:

SOAS, University of London
Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG

Building:

Brunei Gallery

Office No:

B302

Office Hours:

Tuesdays 3pm-4pm in room B406

Biography

Peter Sharrock experienced the American war in Indochina for four years as the Reuters correspondent and discovered how, as the French said, Indochina ‘attaches to the skin’.
The war put the large Angkor temple complex out of reach and this was prolonged as Cambodia closed on itself and underwent the agony inflicted by Pol Pot. He finally reached Angkor in 1990, when landmines abounded and control of temples passed daily between the government and the Khmers Rouges.
His doctorate is on a new interpretation of the Buddhism and imperial politics of the greatest king of ancient Cambodia, Jayavarman VII.

He has developed a 'coherentist' approach to the history of Southeast Asia in which the very limited written sources – temple dedications inscribed in stone – are supplemented by trying to capture the religious and political messages embedded by kings in the decoration of state temples and in sacred icons and by monitoring the international flow of ideas across the states lying between the great centres of learning and technology in India and China.