Cambodia-Centric Scholarly Research Materials, Serials, and Other Online Resources
Southeast Asia Visions is a collection of European travel accounts of pre-modern Southeast Asia from Cornell University’s Echols Collection. The site provides online access to more than 350 firsthand observations and illustrations of life in the region written in English and French.
Khmer Manuscript Heritage Project / Inventory of Khmer Manuscripts
These intertwined collections are the result of a collaboration between the Khmer Manuscript Heritage Project of the Buddhist Digital Resource Center (BDRC) and the Fonds pour l’Édition des Manuscrits du Cambodge (FEMC) of the École française d’Extrême-Orient to safeguard the literary heritage of Cambodia by seeking, cleaning, organizing, and digitizing the majority surviving palm leaf manuscripts The resulting digital collection —56 terabytes consisting of 1,456,341 pages— represents an unparalleled treasure trove of traditional Cambodian literature.
The Cambodia Urban Database was created to provide researchers and practitioners with a one-stop repository of resources on urban topics in Cambodia. It compiles materials and quantitative datasets from documents, reports, articles, master plans, maps, and more.
Historical Dictionary of Cambodia
This reference work makes a large contribution to Cambodia and prominent Khmers offering biographical details on the rulers, leaders, and opinion-makers from the time of Jayavarman II to Hun Sen. It also details key events, recent political developments, and reveals unexpected continuities and discontinuities in elite composition and national ideological outlooks.
Southeast Asian Language Library
To say the Southeast Asian Language Library provides language reference materials for Southeast Asia would be a vast oversimplification. While the entirety of the website is worth exploring, two particular web pages are recommended to Khmerologists: the Corpus of Khmer Inscriptions, which spans more than 1,200 inscriptions and over 1,500 years of history, culture, language, and art across the Mekong delta, and the Khmer Lexicography, whose tri-textual corpus is drawn from two English-Khmer, one Khmer dictionary, and features etymological data.
Siksacakr: Journal of Cambodia Research
Standing for the “Wheel of Knowledge,” Siksacakr is a peer-reviewed journal that aims to bridge the worlds of Khmer, Francophone and Anglophone scholarship on Cambodia to circulate new scholarship and turn the wheels of access and scholarly communication across linguistic, national and disciplinary boundaries. Published by the Center for Khmer Studies.
Udaya, Journal of Khmer Studies
Udaya is a word of Sanskrit origin used in Khmer since ancient times. Pronounced “outey” in Khmer, it means “rising sun,” and by extension “dawn” or “rebirth.” Since its foundation in 2000, Udaya has striven to participate in a Cambodian renaissance. The journal provides a forum and a vehicle for renewal in Khmer Studies –a renewal which cannot be entirely isolated from the political, social and economic aspects of a larger transformation ongoing in Cambodia.
Select Research Centers, Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums in Cambodia
Founded in 1921, and re-established in 1995, the National Archives of Cambodia preserves official government documents since independence as well as important documents of the French colonial administration, newspapers, magazines, posters, maps, and drawings. Nearly 9,000 photographs have already been digitized and can be viewed on computers on-site.
Documentation Center of Cambodia
Since 1994, the Documentionation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam) has been at the forefront of documenting the myriad crimes and atrocities of the Khmer Rouge, its collections contain over one million pages of documents between 1975 and 1979, and several thousand photographs. Next door is the Queen Mother Library, which houses the personal library and archive of Julio Jedres, HM King Norodom Sihanouk’s private secretary and official biographer for many years.
Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center
Inaugurated in 2006, the Bophana Center collects archival films, images, and sounds from and about the audiovisual heritage of Cambodia. covering various themes from documentaries and political propaganda to cinema to traditional music and arts works related to filmmaking.
École française d’Extrême-Orient
The École française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), also known as the French School of the Far East, has operated in Cambodia and produced high quality scholarship on subjects including—but not limited to—arts and archeology, philology and linguistics, and religion, for over a century. Their Khmer research center and library was invited to return to Siem Reap in 1992.
Tuol Sleng is the memorial site of the S-21 interrogation and detention center of the Khmer Rouge regime. It preserves a tragic period in history with the aim to encourage visitors to be messengers of peace. Their physical and digital collections house thousands of photographic prints, negatives, biographies, confessions, lists, notebooks, magazines, and other documents.
Since 1998, the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) has promoted innovative research, teaching, and public service across the social sciences, arts and humanities in Cambodia and the greater Mekong subregion. Its library makes accessible over 19,000 monographs, journals, newspapers, and more on Cambodia and Southeast Asian history and culture in Khmer, French, and English.
Founded in 1930, the Institute is repository of Buddhist texts in print and manuscript format, as well as a publisher in itself: including Kambuja Soriya, a magazine featuring articles on culture, religion, news, Tripitaka scriptures, their translations, and commentaries, among other titles.