Theara Thun

Theara Thun joined the Walter H. Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) as Visiting Postdoctoral Scholar, Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford Fellow on Southeast Asia for fall quarter of 2025. Thun received his PhD in history from the National University of Singapore (NUS), through a joint doctoral program with the Harvard-Yenching Institute (Harvard University). He was the recipient of the 2019 Wang Gungwu Medal and Prize for the “Best PhD Thesis in the Social Sciences/Humanities”. Currently, Dr. Thun is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong, funded by Hong Kong’s Research Grants Council. His research interests include intellectual history, ethnic politics, and post-war education, with a particular focus on Cambodia and Southeast Asia.

His first book entitled Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855–1970 is published by the University of Hawaii Press in August 2024. Apart from critically exploring various kinds and forms of scholarly debates of Cambodian, Thai and French intellectuals, the book brings together one of the largest original indigenous manuscript collections ever put together in a single study of Southeast Asian Studies scholarship. It argues that despite the emergence of Western historical writings during colonial encounters in Cambodia and across Southeast Asia, precolonial historical scholarship was never entirely displaced. Instead, the precolonial indigenous scholarship interfaced with the Western model of historical thought, resulting in the creation of a new body of knowledge with its own distinct epistemology.

As a Lee Kong Chian NUS-Stanford fellow on Southeast Asia, Dr. Thun worked on his second book project which explores post-war intellectual and higher education development in Cambodia. The project seeks to understand how Cambodia’s universities have transformed in relation to society, following the complete destruction of the entire educational system and the massacre of most teaching personnel during the Khmer Rouge regime between 1975 and 1979.