Khmer Studies Forum 2012

ANNOUNCING the 4th Annual Khmer Studies Forum Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Ohio University

Forum Information Schedule at a glance Detailed program schedule Abstracts Coming to the Forum Program Highlights Keynote Speaker: Joel Brinkley Featured Artist: praCh Featured Artist: Pete Pin Film: The Trap of Saving Cambodia Film: Who killed Chea Vichea?

The 4th Annual Khmer Studies Forum will be held at Ohio University, in Athens, Ohio, U.S.A. on Friday, April 27, Saturday, April 28, and Sunday, April 29, 2012. The Khmer Studies Forum is an opportunity to facilitate discussion on topics including but not limited to Khmer language, history, culture, economics, politics, education, and the arts. Faculty, students and community members are invited to participate. Participation in the Khmer Studies Forum is free. This Forum is being organized by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Ohio University, with primary support from the Ohio Humanities Council, Arts for Ohio, and the OHIO Center for International Studies, and additional support from the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism, the College of Health Sciences and Professions, and the Contemporary History Institute. Registration is now open! Click here to register. **We will continue to update this site with program and panel information.**

PROGRAM HIGHLIGHTS

Keynote Speaker

Joel Brinkley, Hearst Visiting Professor in Residence, Stanford University Mr. Joel Brinkley is a Pulitzer Prize-winning foreign correspondent for the New York Times, now serving as the Hearst Visiting Professional in Residence at Stanford University. At Stanford, Brinkley writes a weekly op-ed column on foreign affairs that appears in about 50 newspapers and Websites in the United States and around the world each week, syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He is also a foreign-affairs writer for Politico and maintains an active public-speaking career. His areas of research include American foreign policy and foreign affairs in general, as well as the future of the nation’s newspaper industry. At The New York Times, Brinkley served as Washington correspondent, White House correspondent and chief of the Times Bureau in Jerusalem, Israel. He spent more than 10 years in editing positions including Projects Editor in Washington, Political Editor in New York and Investigations Editor in Washington following the September 11 attacks. He served as political writer in Baghdad during the fall of 2003. He also covered technology issues including the Microsoft anti-trust trial and was serving as foreign-policy correspondent when he left the Times in June 2006. Over the last 30 years Brinkley has reported from 46 states and more than 50 foreign countries. He has won more than a dozen national reporting and writing awards. He won the Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting in 1980 and in the following years was twice a finalist for an investigative reporting Pulitzer (for one, as a member of a team). He was a director of the Fund for Investigative Journalism from 2001 to 2006. He is the author of Cambodia’s Curse: A Troubled History of a Modern Land. http://comm.stanford.edu/faculty/brinkley/ Back to Top

Featured Artists

Hip-hop musician, artist, activist, and filmmaker praCh Rapper praCh (rhymes with “batch”) was born under the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. He escaped with his family to Long Beach, California. While America held great promise, the environments in which praCh found himself in California were those of guns, gangs, and violence. He found refuge in the arts – particularly poetry and music - and combined the two into an incredible hip-hop/rap that has since catapulted him to fame. He cut his first CD, Dalama: The End'n' Is Just the Beginnin', in his parents' garage. He didn't have a mixing board––he used a karaoke machine and sampled sound bites from old Khmer Rouge propaganda speeches to create what he calls an "autobiography," reciting stories he'd heard from his refugee family to deliver a blistering history lesson about Cambodia's genocide. His work resonates not only with the Cambodian American community, but with Cambodians in diaspora as well as artists across the rap and hip-hop industry. The following video provides some brief insight into praCh’s fascinating life:

Khmer Studies Forum 2012