Meet the researchers of the academic year 2024 – 2025 for the fellowship Moving objects, Mobilising Culture in the Context of (De)colonisation

This NIAS – NIOD – KITLV Fellowship gives researchers and heritage experts from previously colonized countries the chance to spend 5 months at NIAS to study and research various objects in the Netherlands, including cultural artifacts, historical items, ancestral pieces, and art. Participants can also explore related archives and documents. They are invited to engage with these collections, reflect on them, and make connections with similar collections in their home countries or elsewhere. The fellowship encourages exploring the social histories and value of these objects, considering their significance over time and space, and think about and beyond issues of restitution and the perspectives of heritage institutions or national histories.

Panggah Ardiyansyah’s research aims to rethink the way we understand Sendang Duwur, a 16th-century Islamic complex in East Java, Indonesia. By doing so, he hopes to add to the growing body of work on heritage politics, exploring how it ties into identity formation, inclusion and exclusion, and concepts of restitution.

Since the looting of the Iraq Museum in 2003, efforts have been made to recover stolen objects. This has stimulated studies of Iraq’s history of art smuggling. However, the period between 1884 and 1939, which was crucial for the antiquities smuggling network, remains understudied. Traders sold cuneiform tablets to European and American museums, as evidenced by surviving letters. Nadia Ait Said-Ghanem aims to trace the provenance of collections sold by the prominent dealer Ibrahim Elias Gejou, focusing on those sold after the Iraqi Antiquities Law of 1936.

Caroline Fernandes Caromano is diving into the lives of the people depicted in 17th-century Dutch Brazil. Her work aims to change the usual way we study history by combining scientific and artistic descriptions with basketry to tell their story. By doing this, she hopes to shed light on the historical portrayal of marginalized groups and their political impact.

Theo Frids Hutabarat focuses on the Batak manuscripts known as pustaha and how museums in the Netherlands take care of them. He aims to study the life of these manuscripts in their current setting, far from their origin in Sumatra, Indonesia.