Penny Edwards

Penny Edwards

Professor and Head Graduate Advisor

(510) 642-1926

Office Location: 351B Dwinelle
Office hours:


Penny Edwards is on sabbatical in 2022-23 to work on the book projects Ephemeral Angkor, a cinematic and
literary history of twentieth century Cambodia, and Kindred Spirits, a group biography of four women. She is
grateful for the award of a Humanities Research Fellowship from the Division of the Arts and Humanities
that has made her sabbatical possible.

 

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 Mekong
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.

TEACHING & MENTORING Penny will not be offering undergraduate or graduate courses in 2022-23. Dr. Rebekah Linh Collins will teach the SSEAS Gateway Course SEA10A Introduction to the Civilization of Southeast Asia in Fall 2022.

While on sabbatical, Penny will continue to supervise her stellar cohort of graduate students in DSSEAS and
to act as Faculty Mentor to Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Cheryl Yin
https://ppfp.ucop.edu/info/fellowship-recipients/fellows-pages/yin-cheryl.html

Penny will not be taking on any new Graduate Students, Honors Students or Postdoctoral Fellows in the
2022-3 admissions and applications cycle.

Southeast Asian Studies Undergraduate Research Awards
Penny congratulates DSSEAS Honors Student Jenkin Leung on his Spring 2022 award of the UC Berkeley
Library Prize for Undergraduate Research (Upper Division) for his Thesis, “Beyond the Chinese Façade:A
Preliminary Study of Three Sino-Vietnamese Legends from Lĩnh Nam Chích Quái嶺南摭怪(Wonders
Selected from South of the Passes)”  https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2p3293k8 Congratulations are also
due to Jenny Lai Chinnapha, recipient of the 2021 UC Berkeley Undergraduate Research Prize for her
SEA10A Research Paper, Thailand’s Healthcare, Culture, Media, and COVID-19 Story: A Review of Thailand’s
COVID-19 Response and its Impact on Public Health, Economics, and Citizens’ Personal Experiences available
at https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0nj3g54t for her success in the NIU and Cornell University Southeast
Asia Digital Library Undergraduate Paper Awards, July 2022.

Curriculum Vitae

Courses