Kunthea Chhom completed her Bachelor degrees in French and English literatures in 2001 and 2004 respectively, at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (Cambodia). In 2005, she went to India to pursue her Master degree in Sanskrit in Magadh University – Bodh Gaya (Bihar, India). One year after completion of her Master degree in 2008, she enrolled in a doctoral program at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes – Paris. In 2016, she defended her Ph.D. thesis.
Since November 2008, Kunthea has been working for the Apsara Authority, Siem Reap, which is in charge of the preservation of the ancient monuments in the World Heritage site of Angkor. She works on stone inscriptions from ancient Cambodia (covering the present-day Cambodia, some parts of Thailand, Vietnam and Laos). Her research focuses mainly on the development of Old Khmer language which was in close contact with Sanskrit from the 6th to the 14th century CE. Besides her epigraphical research, she teaches Sanskrit grammar and Sanskrit inscriptions from ancient Cambodia at the Faculty of Archaeology, University of Fine Arts, Phnom Penh.
In the DHARMA project, she is in charge of manual keying of texts of Cambodian inscriptions (Task-force C). She finds the work interesting as it gives her the opportunity not only to read many Cambodian inscriptions with an approach different from that she had at the time of her Ph.D. thesis but also to work with a dynamic team with diverse expertise.
Selected publications
2019 [coauthored with Arlo Griffiths] “A Problematic Inscription from Ancient Cambodia (K. 1237)”, Udaya 14, pp. 3-22.
2018 Le rôle du Sanskrit dans le développement de la langue khmère: une étude épigraphique du VIe au XIVe siècle. Phnom Penh: Sastra Publishing House.
2011 Koh Ker Inscriptions, vol. 1. Budapest: Publications of the Hungarian South East Asian Institute.
