Linda Chhath

Linda Chhath is a doctoral student in Languages and Cultures of Asia, specializing in the history of Buddhism in Cambodia. She holds a MA from the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at UW Madison and a BA in History and Anthropology from UC Santa Cruz. Her doctoral research will focus on Cambodia’s post-independence period under the rule of Norodom Sihanouk, from independence in 1953 to his fall by a military coup in 1970. The aim of her project is to examine the struggle of defining and constructing sovereignty in the aftermath of colonization, which she seeks to do through the lens of Cambodia’s Buddhist ethical media. With funding from the Scott-Kloeck Jenson Fellowship as well as the Social Science Research Council, Linda will go to Cambodia this summer to investigate various cultural forms that constituted the new media sources of the period being studied. She will examine them as the sites in which popular expressions of social ethics were produced. Her hypothesis is that an investigation of these sites may reveal deep and broad social and political anxieties existent in Cambodia as a result of its colonized past.

Read on about Linda Chhath’s SKJ Fellowship experience here.