Professor Ashley Thompson

Ashley Thompson is a specialist in Southeast Asian Art Histories, with particular expertise in Cambodia, ‘Hindu-Buddhist’ arts, sexual difference and subjectivities, memory, political and cultural transition, and deconstructive critical practice. This work nurtures a growing commitment to intervening in the decolonial futures of the discipline of Art History more broadly.

This research orientation began during her undergraduate years in the History and Literature Department at Harvard, where she wrote her final dissertation on American literature of the ‘Vietnam’ War, and during a junior year abroad in Paris, where she attended Hélène Cixous’s seminar and play, L’Histoire terrible mais inachevée de Norodom Sihanouk, roi du Cambodge.

This experience set her on a path to Cambodia and Thailand, where she spent ten years working in post-war reconstruction across the fields of education, art, archaeology, and cultural heritage research and management. She has since undertaken research on a wide range of Southeast Asian arts. She attributes much of this work to the visionary mentoring of writer and feminist Hélène Cixous, historical anthropologist Ang Choulean, and architect-statesman Vann Molyvann.

Her work at SOAS is also informed by experience gained in a diversity of higher education settings, including the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Paris 8, and the University of Leeds.

She has recently completed a collaborative research project funded by the Getty Foundation’s Connecting Art Histories scheme, Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art, and is developing further work in the area of restitution.

Inaugural Lecture

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Ashley Thompson’s research is informed by an abiding question: is ‘art’ dead or alive? While in some respects rhetorical, this question is no less vital to understanding past bio-cultural ecologies and to intervening judiciously in future ones. It underpins the various areas of research she has developed over the years.

Her research includes examination of the historical watershed of the 13th century in mainland Southeast Asia, in which ‘Middle Period’ Cambodia emerges through the periodic reanimation of Angkorian temples and sculptures, even as these recede into the past. She also examines the determining role played by literary and sculptural arts in the interlocking ritual production of sexual difference and territorial definition that shaped Angkor. More recently, her research has turned to the potential of restitution processes to engender new interpretive agencies and concomitant art historical ecologies.