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21-02-2025
During this upcoming conference researchers will present their findings, reflect on the last four years of the Islanders at the Helm project and share insights that matter for everyone living and working on any of the islands of St. Maarten, Saba, St. Eustatius, Aruba, Bonaire and Curaçao.
21-02-2025
In February PhD researcher Sulakshana de Mel went back to Sri Lanka for the 125 years' celebration of Ladies' College Colombo. Sulakshana who is an alumna of LC spoke with several media about the coffee table book she composed about LC.
13-01-2025
KITLV director Diana Suhardiman visited the Kadaster of St. Maarten during her tour in January through the Caribbean & Surinam, in the company of Francio Guadeloupe who has been doing research on and in the Caribbean for many years.
KITLV invites scholars working in the fields of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies to apply for a Visiting Fellowship in 2025.
This fellowship is intended for researchers from formerly colonised countries with an interest in (lost) collections or objects.
Island(er)s at the Helm closing conference Climate Challenges in the (Dutch) Caribbean in October 2025.
Call for Papers: Online Influence Operations and Democracy in Southeast Asia for a closing workshop in August 2025
The KITLV is a research institute dedicated to the study of societal challenges, focusing on the histories and afterlives of colonialism in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the Netherlands. Our aim is to produce quality research that furthers justice and envisions alternative futures beyond dominant perspectives.
Our research is informed by intimate familiarity with the cultures, histories, and languages of the places we study. Combining history, anthropology, archaeology, political science, linguistics, and the arts, our interdisciplinary perspective is critical and sensitive to marginalised voices.
Expensive elections campaigns are a threat to democracies around the world, because they generate corruption and political inequality. Yet, due to methodological obstacles and a western bias in the current literature, we do not really know what makes election campaigns expensive.
Expensive elections campaigns are a threat to democracies around the world, because they generate corruption and political inequality. Yet, due to methodological obstacles and a western bias in the current literature, we do not really know what makes election campaigns expensive.
What did enslaved people do to gain citizenship rights and what determined their success? By analyzing and linking different archival collections, this project investigates how people in Dutch colonies emancipated over several generations and developed an informal form of citizenship.
Driven by the increasing public awareness of the impact of hurricanes and the devastation of coastal areas, Island(er)s at the Helm contributes to equipping (Dutch) Caribbean societies with proficient tools for confronting these challenging climatic phenomena.
A project on the coloniality of Asian library and manuscript-formations. With KITLV Special Collections as point of departure, we study the social biographies of manuscripts, and the colonial histories of collecting, to gain insight into the role of violence therein, and to recognize local agency in the makings of so-called Asian Libraries.
Our publications
In this book The Dutch Transatlantic slave trade: New methods, perspectives, and sources, a new gene...
Our publications
During the colonial and early independence periods, the Chinese community in Jakarta was governed by...
Our publications
Legacies of colonialism in museum collections: The (un)making of Indonesian Islam in the Netherlands...
KITLV Journals
New advanced article in the New West Indian Guide (NWIG) titled ‘Rip Van Winkle in the rainforest’ w...
Our publications
Article ‘The infrastructure of domestic influence operations: Cyber troops and public opinion manipu...
KITLV Books
The Caribbean Series at Brill offers monographs and edited volumes by intellectuals from academe and...