SOAS names new academic post in honour of former correspondent Peter Sharrock

Sharrock was bureau chief in Saigon for four years during the Vietnam war and led the East Africa bureau in Nairobi for a similar period before becoming a senior manager in Germany and central Europe.

But he then gave up journalism and turned to studying art and archaeology in Southeast Asia, a subject on which he is now a leading expert. He holds several senior roles at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies).

He has said that during his time reporting from Vietnam and Cambodia he discovered how the region “attaches to the skin” -- a saying from the French colonial period in Indochina.

His doctorate at SOAS was on the interpretation of the Buddhism and imperial politics of the greatest king of ancient Cambodia, Jayavarman VII.

The Independent newspaper called him a British Indiana Jones in 2009 when he trekked into snake infested jungle near Angkor Wat and discovered the missing 900-year-old giant legs of an eight-headed, three-metre-high sandstone statue of Hevajra, a wrathful, tantric Buddhist deity. 

SOAS is now assessing candidates to take up the new Peter D. Sharrock Chair in Tantric Buddhist Art in October 2026.

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