Michael Vickery

Michael Theodore Vickery is a historian and author, who worked as an associate professor and lecturer on Southeast Asian history at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia (1989). In 2004 Vickery introduced himself as an independent scholar associated with the Asia Research Institute of the National University of Singapore. He acquired a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1977 with his dissertation: "Cambodia after Angkor: the chronicular evidence for the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries"

He lived, studied, and taught at high school - and university levels in various South-East Asian countries, such as Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Malaysia from 1960 to 1967, 1970 to 1972 and 1973 to 1979 and in Australia from 1979 to 1988.

Vickery's research and writings have concentrated on ancient and modern history of Cambodia and Thailand with publications ranging from early history to contextual studies and interpretations of recent and contemporary Cambodia - being one of only a handful scholars, who comprehensively examined regional events during the 1980s.

Vickery essentially contributed to and helped to extend the scholarly debate of the Pre-Angkorian kingdoms, the classic age and the dark ages of Cambodia, introducing and integrating the works of the Cambodian scholars Khin Sok and Mak Phoen by utilizing their alternative view-points. On the basis of volumes of previously non-deciphered epigraphic inscriptions, Vickery elaborated on the fact, that many works of earlier scholars, "...written 20 years ago may be simply refuted by the discovery or the deciphering of a [new] inscription". and further: "To study nowadays Cambodian history with [Georges] Coédès would amount to do geography with Ptolemy".

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