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Philippe Peycam

Portrait of Philippe   Peycam

Philippe Peycam is a trained historian of South East Asia (in particular modern Vietnam) and the director of the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, Netherlands, where he also supervised the transnational program ​“Humanities across Borders, Asia and Africa in the World” (2017−2021). 

With a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London, Peycam was the Founding Director of the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) in Cambodia (1999−2009), a United States Institute of Peace’s Jenning Randolph Fellow and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. 

He focused his research on resistance to colonialism and Vietnam, the history of academic knowledge production in Cambodia, and issues related to heritage preservation strategies and their political and social impacts, 

Selected Publications

  • Intellectuals and political commitment in Vietnam: the emergence of a public sphere in colonial Saigon (1916−1928), PhD thesis, University of London, 1999 [unpublished].
  • [with Eric Heikkila] ​“Economic Development in the Shadow of Angkor Wat: Meaning, Legitimation, and Myth,” Journal of Planning Education and Research 29(3), 2010 :294 – 309.
  • “Sketching an Institutional History of Academic Knowledge Production in Cambodia (1863−2009)”, Part 1: Sojourn, Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 25 – 2, Oct. 2010: 153 – 177; Part 2: Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 26 – 1, April 2011: 16 – 35.
  • The Birth of Vietnamese Political Journalism: Saigon, 1916 – 1930, New York, Columbia University Press, 2012, 320 p.
  • “From the Social to the Political: 1920s Colonial Saigon as a ​‘Space of Possibilities’ in Vietnamese Consciousness,”
    positions: asia critique 21 – 3, 2013: 497 – 546.
  • “The International Coordinating Committee for Angkor: A World Heritage Site as an Arena of Competition, Connivance and State(s) Legitimation,” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 31 – 3, Nov. 2016: 743 – 785.
  • [ed. with Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, Hui Yew-Foong] Citizens, Civil Society and Heritage-making in Asia, Singapore, ISEAS — Yusof Ishak Institute, 2017.
  • [ed. with Shu-Li Wang, Hui Yew-Foong, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao] Heritage as Aid and Diplomacy in Asia, Singapore, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute; International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS); Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, 2020, 347 p.
  • Cultural Renewal in Cambodia: Academic Activism in the Neoliberal Era, Brill/​ISEAS, 2020, 297 p. ISBN 978- 981−44− 59945.
  • Intellectuals and political commitment in Vietnam: the emergence of a public sphere in colonial Saigon, 1916 – 1928 (1999).