I had a dream. Last week, there was a big party in Leiden’s cathedral, the Pieterskerk. There, an international community of esteemed scholars and enlightened visitors had flocked together to celebrate the event...
While many Dutch people know about Mandarin and Cantonese, few are familiar with Hokkien, an oft-neglected Chinese dialect that prevails in southern China...
“History is being erased!” So cried Donald Trump, surely no great student of history, in sudden righteous indignation earlier this week. His mass of supporters have roused themselves from perusing the aisles of Wal-Marts...
Situated in an inconspicuous residential area in the south of Surabaya, one could easily overlook one of Indonesia’s most intriguing libraries and its equally fascinating owner. Tom Hoogervorst looks back on a fruitful week of research spent at Medayu Agung...
21 June 2017 marks the first day of summer in the northern hemisphere. Dutch children still have to wait a few more weeks before their summer vacation starts, but in astronomical terms, summer officially arrives Wednesday. The difference in between...
It’s grant writing season again. This is a stressful time for all struggling academics. But one of the biggest stresses is that every grant application now demands some sort of obeisance to the Gods of Utility. We must exhaustively document how our...
The recent turmoil about the role of radical Islam in elections for a new Governor of Jakarta conceals another dimension of Indonesian politics: the decades long effort of an old elite family to grab the presidency in Indonesia....
“What should we do with academic institutions inherited from a cruel past? Are such institutions reformable, or should they simply be decommissioned? Or, for that matter, literally be burned down in the hope ...
The South China Sea dispute is often portrayed as an archetypal case of an overbearing great power bullying its weaker neighbours. A common kneejerk reaction to this...
Sometimes fiction tells the truth and history perpetuates a fiction. This blog tells us about how history has been used to serve the creation of a national mythology, while fiction has allowed a ...