Internship Projects
Photo: CO-OP interns (left to right) Ing Morokoth, Pim Fitzpayne, and Phuy Meychean examining Southeast Asian materials in the reserves of the British Museum. (Reproduced with permission).
The CO-OP programme supports internship projects during the academic year. Interns carry out research focused on collections in US and UK archives, under the mentorship of the core academic team. Their research supports the broader research programme by defining barriers to provenance research and by examining ideas of “restitution”. These projects are brought into dialogue with restitution processes through knowledge exchange events and web publications.
Coming Soon - KHMER DANCE PHOTOGRAPHS AT THE BRITISH MUSEUM
September 2025 - December 2025
This project – a collaboration between CO-OP and the British Museum – navigates the complex afterlives of photographs taken by European visitors to colonial French Indochina. Research into photographs of two early 20th-century dance troupes has facilitated their formal entry into the British Museum’s collection, whilst simultaneously providing a striking illustration of the many transformations of interpretation and interaction experienced throughout the lifetime of an image. In sharing the images with scholars of Cambodian dance, as well as with the families of the dancers photographed, a vision for their future as an archive of pre-Khmer Rouge dance has been sketched out.
Culminating in a digital repatriation of the images to archives in Phnom Penh, the project asks:
- How can we understand photographs taken by Europeans in colonial Southeast Asia, especially those now held by European collections?
- What role does digital repatriation play in the reconstitution of scattered cultural memory?
- To what extent is digital repatriation, which often sidesteps uncomfortable confrontations, the “polite face” of restitution?
Interns
Coming Soon - khmer antiquities in us archives
October 2024 - march 2025
The three interns undertook archival research in US archives as part of two SOAS Research and Knowledge Exchange grants on looting and restitution of Khmer antiquities held by Professor Ashley Thompson. (2024: Impact and Knowledge Exchange; 2025: International Science Partnerships Fund. Both of these come under UK government Official Development Assistance to Low and Middle Income Countries.)
The project resulted in a database of archival documents from the Rockefeller Archive Center; Southeast Asian Art Foundation (SAAF) Archive, University of Michigan; Metropolitan Museum of Art – Thomas J. Watson Library (MET Library); Smithsonian Archives of American Art; and Cleveland Museum of Art Archive. Case studies from this work will be published soon.
In June 2025, Morokoth and Meychean presented their work at the International Conference on Recovery of Cultural Heritage, organized in Lalitpur by the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign (NHRC).
Interns
Digital Repatriation of Javanese Manuscripts
October 2023 - January 2024
This project investigates the material realities, possibilities, and resonances of digitisation. A short podcast series, Sacred Pixels: Navigating the British Library’s Digitisation of the Yogyakarta Kraton Manuscripts, brings together research in the manuscript collections at the British Library and interviews with scholars. In four episodes, it explores early methods of digitising and collecting, material embodiments in manuscript cultures, contemporary Indonesian discourse on repatriation of manuscripts, and production of knowledge in the colonial archive.
In exploring the epistemic violence of colonial knowledge production, the project asks:
- If the archive itself is a technology of colonialism, can the creation of new archives resist reinscribing its violence?
- What kind of community/social relationships exist around a manuscript and how do they change after the manuscript enters a virtual plane?
Intern
Khmer Collections at the British Museum
October 2023 - January 2024
This project examines the entanglement of the art market and museums in the context of the Khmer collection at the British Museum. Through provenance research, the project draws the contours of the collection, investigating object types held as well as the actors—both individuals and institutions—which affected the collection development. In seeking to uncover the sometimes complex acquisition histories of select objects only minimally documented in the museum we aim also to probe the place of the museum in assigning market value and facilitating ongoing trade.
With a focus on the Khmer objects at the British Museum, the project questions:
- To what extent does the transfer of art objects from private collectors to public museums hinder or help understandings of these objects?
- Why does provenance matter and what information is lost, concealed or produced in the processes of transfer?