NEW WRITING
Penny’s new book, Kingdoms of the Mind: Burma’s fugitive prince and the fracturing of empire, is forthcoming with Columbia University Press. Beginning with a murderous coup in Mandalay in 1866 and ending with a death in Saigon some fifty years later, Kingdoms tells the story of the rebel royal, fugitive assassin and political refugee, the Myngun Prince and his ultimately futile quest to wrest sovereignty from the jaws of empire. Moving between Konbaung Burma, the British Raj, the courts of Windsor and Bangkok through penal colonies and stowaway cabins to French India and Indochina, Kingdoms uncovers the networks of adventure capital, spiritual belief and political kinship that would ultimately topple empire in South and Southeast Asia.
You can hear Penny talk about the book here https://myanmarmusings.com/princely-possibilities-myingun- in-exile This Winter, Penny joins ko ko thett and Kenneth Wong as guest editor of a Burma/Myanmar feature in Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing 34/2, co-edited with Alok Bhalla and Frank Stewart (Hawai’i University Press, 2022). Her review of Aurore Candier’s La réforme politique en Birmanie pendant le premier moment colonial (1819-1878), Paris, EFEO is forthcoming in the Journal of Burma Studies.
In Cambodia studies, Penny’s chapter “Inarguably Angkor” will appear in The Angkorian World edited by Mitch Hendrickson Damien Evans, and Miriam Stark (Routledge: March 2023).
Penny’s translation of Soth Polin’s novella L’anarchiste (Paris, Table Ronde, 2011), is forthcoming with Gazebo Books, Australia, in 2023, and was excerpted in the summer 2022 issue of Mānoa: A Pacific Journal of International Writing (33-2, 34-1). Penny reflects on questions of translation in the Spring 2022 Mekon Review essay, “Don’t Look Away” and in “Beyond Words: Going off-script in Theravada Southeast Asia” in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (53, 1-2), pp. 344-348, March-June 2022.
