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Leedom Lefferts, Ph.D.
Leedom Lefferts is Senior Research Fellow at the Asian Civilisations Museum. He was professor of anthropology at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey (USA), for three decades before retiring in 2004 to undertake full-time research and writing. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Colorado (USA), and has conducted ethnographic field research for over 40 years in northeast Thailand, with comparable experience in neighboring Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and southern China. His interests include food, population studies, village expressive behavior, and indigenous pottery production. He was co-author of Textiles and the Tai Experience in Southeast Asia (Washington, 1992), and his many other publications include, “Sticky Rice, Fermented Fish, and the Course of a Kingdom: The Politics of Food in Northeast Thailand” (Asian Studies Review 29, 2005), and “Art, Textiles, and Social Action in Theravada Buddhist Thailand” (in A Companion to Asian Art and Architecture. New York, 2011). During his time at the ACM he is studying the long, painted Theravada Buddhist scrolls of northeast Thailand and Laos.
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Yao Chongxin, Ph.D.
Yao Chongxin is the Kwan Im Thong Hood Cho Temple Fellow at the Asian Civilisations Museum. He is professor of archaeology at Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, China. He earned his Ph.D. in Buddhist archaeology at Peking University in 2001. His academic interests are the history of cultural exchange between ancient China and western world, Buddhist archaeology, and Buddhist art. In research methodologies, he emphasises combining the text with iconographical materials. His publications include A Primary Study on Buddhist Sculptures in Bashu Area: Focusing on the northern Sichuan (Beijing, 2011), and Studies on Arts, Religions in Medieval China and the History of Western Regions (Beijing, 2011). He also works as a translator of academic books. While at the ACM, he is studying Guanyin imagery and belief in ancient China, as well as Buddhist imagery in ancient Southeast Asia.
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