Joel Montague

Joel G. Montague (b. 1936 — New York, USA ) is a retired public health officer who has worked in some 20 countries worldwide, including Cambodia where he wasa active from 1991 until 1996 and developed a keen interest in Cambodian modern history.

He started his international travels when he went to Iran in 1960 on a Fulbright Fellowship to study Farsi and tribal relations in Baluchistan. He joined CARE organization, working on public health programs in Iran, Egypt and Tunisia. He was also on numerous assignments with The World Bank, UNFPA, WHO, and local nonprofit organizations. In Cambodia, he represented the John Snow Research and Training in Phnom Penh, running a malaria-control program for Partners for Development (PFD), an organization dedicated to improving quality of life for those in developing countries. During his free time, he roamed the country on a motorbike, collecting hand-painted shop signs and postcards, pushing as far as the border with Thailand to visit the place where Khmer Rouge dictator Pol Pot had died.

With his Iranian-born wife, Shahnaz, a physician, and their two children, Montague has lived in London before settling back in Massachusetts, USA. A Trustee of the US Committee for Refugees, Immigration and Refugee Services of America and the National Council for International Health, an Honorary Fellow of the Institute of Humanities of the University of Edinburgh and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, he has been distinguished with several honors for his dedication to public health. 

His independent research on the history of modern Cambodia had brought him to revisit texts by French explorers of the 19th and early 20th centuries. In 2012, Joel Montague donated numerous pieces of his personal collection of Cambodian shop signs from the 1990s to the Fowler Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles, California. 

Selected Publications

• [ed. and tr. with William G. Vann] The Colonial Good Life: A Commentary on André Joyeux’s Vision of French Indochina, Bangkok, White Lotus Press. 2008, 120 p. ISBN 9789744801425.
• [editor, author of texts] Picture Postcards of Cambodia 1900 – 1950, Bangkok, White Lotus Press, 2010, 337 p.
• [with Kent Davis [ed.] & Daria Lacy [designer]] Cambodian Shop Signs, DatASIA, 2013, 60 p. ISBN‎ 978 – 1934431931.
• [with Jim Mizerski] John Thomson: The Early Years — In Search of the Orient, Bangkok, White Lotus Press, 2014. ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978 – 9748434940.
• [ed. with Jim Mizerski; Marie-Hélène Arnauld [tr.]] Cambodia Past: Explaining the Present, DatASIA, 2016. ISBN13 978 – 19344316272016. [from Etienne Aymonier’s Notes sur le Cambodge (1875), illustrated with photographs by Emile Gsell]. 
• [ed.; Marie-Hélène Arnauld [tr.]] Notes and Memories of Cambodia by Bernard Marrot, DatASIA, 2019, 114 p. ISBN13 9781934431238.
• [ed. with Jim Mizerski; Marie-Hélène Arnauld [tr.]] Vorvong and Saurivong: A Cambodian Tale, DatASIA, 2021 [from Auguste Pavie​’s 1897 text].