m.a.a.buana[at]hum.leidenuniv.nl
Buana, MA Louie
Muhammad Buana (Louie) is a PhD Candidate at Institute for History, Leiden University. He studied law and history, specializing himself on the legal history of adat (customary law), environmental and maritime connections, and the interplay between Islam and colonialism in the Southeast Asian archipelago.
He earned a Bachelor degree in Colonial and Global History through the Cosmopolis Program (2015) and an Advanced Master’s in European and International Human Rights Law (2016). A dedicated heritage storyteller and folklore enthusiast, he founded the Lontara Project in 2011—a youth movement aimed at revitalizing La Galigo, the world’s most extensive literary work from South Sulawesi, through innovative media targeted at younger audiences. In 2024, he was awarded a research grant from the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities for his project, “Lontara Digital: Developing a Text Recognition Model for Lontara Manuscripts Using Transcriber and PyLaia.” This pioneering initiative seeks to enhance accessibility and literacy for South Sulawesi’s Lontara sources through advanced technology. As a writer, Louie has been recognized as an Emerging Writer at the Makassar International Writers Festival (2014, 2023) and invited to present at notable literary events, including the Borobudur Writers and Cultural Festival (2019, 2020) and the Ubud Writers & Readers Festival (2021).
Selected Publications
‘A Bugis nautical chart on a Moro ship evidence of multi-ethnic commercial and knowledge networks in the 19th-century Makassar Strait and Sulu Zone’, in: The Murillo Bulletin, Journal of The Phillipine Map Collectors Society 18, 2024.
‘Islands, maps, and Lontara’; Bugis counter-mapping on a nineteenth-century map of Nusantara’, in: Wacana, Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia 24- 3, 2023.
‘The stranger sea queens: Gender, migration, and power in Sulawesi and Java’, in: Gender at Sea, Amsterdam: Jaarboek voor Vrouwengeschiedenis, 2023.
‘Legal analysis of presidential regulation No. 98 of 2021: Carbon Economic Value (NEK) and Carbon Pricing in Indonesia’, in: National University of Singapore Law Working Paper 2023/005, 2023.
‘Besse dan lukisan purba kawasan Karst Maros-Pangkep: Tantangan reinterpretasi sejarah melalui visual storytelling’, in: N. Sirimorok, N. Arsuka (eds.), Yang hilang ditelan kuasa. Makassar: Ininnawa, 2022.
‘Legenda La Salaga’, La Salaga Project. Atelier KITLV, 2022.
‘”As above, so below”: The heavens, epidemics, and destruction in Javanese and South Sulawesi manuscripts’, in: Menolak Wabah (Suara-Suara dari Manuskrip, Relief, Khazanah Rempah dan Ritual Nusantara), Borobudur Writers and Cultural Festival, Yogyakarta: Ombak, 2021.
‘Borrowing adat and bargaining Islam: The creation and Islamisation of customary law in Mandar’, in: M. Kooria, S. Ravensbergen (eds.), Islamic law in the Indian Ocean world: Texts, ideas and practices. Oxon & NY: Routledge, 2021.
‘Mosque design in the 19th century: How colonial powers introduced the dome into Islamic architecture in the Dutch East Indies and British Malaya’, in: Aziatische Kunst Bulletin 1, 2020.
‘La Galigo sebagai teks hukum? Jejak dan evolusi hukum adat dalam epos Bugis kuno’, [La Galigo as legal text? Traces and evolution of adat in Bugis epic cycle], in: M. Hadrawi, N. Rahman (eds.), Jelajah tiga dunia I La Galigo. Makassar: Ininnawa, 2019.
