Michael Vickery

Michael Theodore Vickery was an American historian, lecturer, and author known for his works about the history of Southeast Asia. Vickery was born on April 1, 1931, in Billings, Montana. After acquiring a Bachelor of Arts in Russian studies from the University of Washington in 1952, Vickery became a Fulbright scholar in Finland from 1953 to 1955 before joining the United States Army in Germany from 1956 to 1958. He then taught English in Istanbul, Turkey, from 1958 to 1960, in Cambodia from 1960 to 1964, and Laos from 1964 to 1967.

He carried out thesis research in Cambodia and Thailand from 1970 to 1972. He halted it in 1973 when he became a lecturer in Southeast Asian history at the Universiti Sains Malaysia in Penang, Malaysia, where he worked until 1979. He resumed and completed the research in 1977, naming it Cambodia After Angkor: The Chronicular Evidence for the Fourteenth to Sixteenth Centuries. Vickery received a Doctor of Philosophy in history from Yale University in the same year.

Following that, he became a research fellow in Southeast Asian history at the Australian National University from 1979 to 1982, a research fellow in Southeast Asian history at the University of Adelaide from 1982 to 1988, and a senior lecturer in Southeast Asian history at the Universiti Sains Malaysia from 1988 to 1998. He then taught Cambodian history at the Royal University of Fine Arts in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, from 1998 to 2002.

He worked as an independent scholar based in Chiang Mai Province, Thailand, from 2002 to 2008. The next year, he became a visiting professor at the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry, University of Sydney, where he worked until at least 2011. On June 29, 2017, Vickery died of a heart attack at the age of 86 in Battambang Province, Cambodia, where his funeral was held for five days. His Khmer-American wife, Angelina Vickery, and his two daughters, Angelina and Mimi (the latter of whom is adopted), survived him.

Vickery's research and writings have concentrated on the 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 of 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 Post-Angkor Period, introducing and integrating the works of the Cambodian scholars Khin Sok and Mak Phoen by utilizing their alternative viewpoints.

Based on 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 an [new] inscription". And further: "To study Cambodian history with [Georges], Coédès nowadays would amount to doing geography with Ptolemy." In 1984, he published his book "Cambodia 1975–1982" which covers the years of the Pol Pot era and its immediate aftermath.

Vickery's work has been described as falling into "Marxist schools of thought" by some scholars, although he wasn't a communist. He is considered and regularly cited as a "Cambodia expert," one of the leading historians of Cambodian history, and a "giant of Southeast Asian scholarship."