Theara Thun

Thun Theara ធុន ធារ៉ា (b. Kampong Cham Province, Cambodia) is a Cambodian historian researching the cultural and political history of mainland Southeast Asia.

After graduating from the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) in 2008, he received a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to pursue an M.A. in Southeast Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. Returning to Cambodia in July 2011, he was recruited as a lecturer in the Department of History at RUPP. From 2012 to 2016, he followed the Harvard-Yenching-Institute (Massachusetts, USA)-National-University-of-Singapore (NUS) Joint Doctoral Scholarship, and was awarded the Wang Gungwu Gold Medal and Prize for the Best PhD Thesis in Social Sciences and Humanities, submitted at NUS in 2019. 

Theara Thun was a junior resident fellow of Center for Khmer Studies (CKS) in Siam Reap in 2008, a postdoctoral fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden, a research assistant at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS), Kyoto University, Japan, a research fellow under the Research Grants Council Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme, Faculty of Education, the University of Hong Kong. Before moving to Hong Kong, he and a research assistant professor at Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies (CSEAS). 

Dr Thun’s research interests include intellectual history, ethnic studies, and postwar education. He has published several peer-reviewed journal articles in Critical Asian Studies, Studies in Higher Education, Asian Studies Review, TRaNS: Trans-Regional and ‑National Studies of Southeast Asia, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. 

In 2025, he co-instructed with Prof. Duong Keo a class of 14 Cambodian Master’s students part of the Ponlok Chomnes Research Fellowship Program under the Center for Khmer Studies (CKS-PCRF, Siem Reap).

Selected Publications

• “An epistemological shift from palace chronicles to scholarly Khmer historiography under French colonial rule”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 51(1 – 2), 2020: 132 – 153.
• “Treason and loyalty to the Royal court: the Kan narrative in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Khmer chronicle manuscripts”, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 31(2), 2021: 343 – 362.
• [with Keo Duong] ​“Ethnic Vietnamese and the Khmer Rouge: the genocide and race debate”, Critical Asian Studies 53(3), 2021: 325 – 341.
• “Invasion” or ​“Liberation”?: Contested commemoration in Cambodia and within ASEAN, TRaNS: Trans Regional and National Studies of Southeast Asia 9(2), 2021: 219 – 235.
• Epistemology of the Past: Texts, History, and Intellectuals of Cambodia, 1855 – 1970, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2024.
• [with Keo Duong] ​“Ethnocentrism of victimhood: tracing the discourses of Khmer ethnicity in precolonial and colonial Cambodia”, Asian Studies Review, 2024: 1 – 20.