Penny Edwards

Penny Edwards is an associate professor in the Department of South & Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley.  For some years she has been working across archives, disciplines and genres on a book on the Myngun Prince of Burma, its latest title is the peacocks are all gone.  She has published articles on this, including “Watching the Detectives: the Elusive Exile of Prince Myngoon of Burma”  in Ronit Ricci (Ed) Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration, Honolulu: Hawaii University Press (2016) and more recently, some reflections on the archive in “Archival Detours: Sourcing Colonial History” in Fiona Paisley and Kirsty Reid, ed. Sources and Methods in Histories of Colonialism: Approaching the Imperial Archive  (London: Routledge, 2017). 

She is working on projects that explore Cambodian cinema, and Chinese cinema in Southeast Asia, in the 1950s-1960s, and Moveable Easts: Alexandra David-Néel, Mirra Alfassa, Suzanne Karpelès and the constructions of Buddhism in France and Empire