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Hoefte, Prof. dr. Rosemarijn

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Rosemarijn Hoefte is a historian specialized in the Caribbean. She is Professor in the history of Suriname after 1873 in comparative perspective at the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests are the history of postabolition Suriname, migration and unfree labor, contemporary Caribbean history, and nation building and nation branding in postcolonial states. Her current projects are a study of Surinamese social activist and politician Grace Schneiders-Howard and an analysis of nation building and nation branding across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. 

Rosemarijn Hoefte studied History at Leiden University, and Latin American Studies (MA 1982) and History (PhD 1987) at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her dissertation was on British Indian and Javanese indentured labor on the largest plantation in Suriname. In 2006 she received a four-year NWO grant to study the history of twentieth-century Suriname. The synthesis of this research project, Suriname in the long twentieth century, was published in 2014. In 2010, she coordinated a three-country oral history project on the cultural heritage of Surinamese Javanese. She has (co-)organized workshops on (post)colonial biographies (University of Groningen, 2007), the Three Guianas: Similarities and differences (KITLV 2013), the Javanese diaspora (Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta 2013), and Transnationalism, reform movements, and decolonization in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean (KITLV 2018). In addition to monographs and edited volumes, she has published more than 100 articles on the Caribbean and Latin America in scholarly books and journals, and the popular press. 

Rosemarijn has wide-ranging research interests. In ‘Departing from Java’ on the Javanese diaspora she focuses on Javanese labor, migration, and diaspora as a global phenomenon. She also is working on a study of the life and times of Grace Schneiders-Howard, a social activist and the first female politician in Suriname. Recently she was the principal investigator in the studies of the colonial history of Haarlem and the colonial and postcolonial history of Tilburg. Hoefte is charge of the KITLV Publication program with Brill Academic Publishers and she is the editor-in-chief of the New West Indian Guide, the oldest journal on the Caribbean. She is a past president of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH). 

Selected Publications

Een Westers beschavingsoffensief: Sporen van het koloniale en postkoloniale verleden van Tilburg. Amsterdam: Walburg Pers, 2024. 

With Henk Schulte Nordholt, Dineke Stam & Mariette van Wenum, Koloniaal Haarlem. Haarlem: Uitgeverij Loutje, 2023. 

‘Nation-building and nation-branding in the Caribbean: Comparative reflections on national imaginaries and their consequences’ (with Michiel Baud), in Alex van Stipriaan, Luc Alofs & Francio Guadeloupe (eds), Caribbean Cultural Heritage and the Nation: Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao in a Regional Context, pp. 27-45. Leiden: Leiden University Press, 2023. 

‘Modernity and the middle class in late colonial Paramaribo’, in: Elahi, J. & et al. (eds.), Against better judgement: Rethinking multicultural society, pp. 143-152, 2022. 

With Wouter Veenendaal, ‘The challenges of nation branding in Suriname, a multi-ethnic, post-colonial country’, in Dinnie, K. (ed.), Nation branding: Concepts, issues, practice,  pp. 174-176, 2022. 

With Harriëtte Mingoen, ‘Where is home? Changing conceptions of the homeland in the Surinamese-Javanese diaspora’, Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia 23-3, pp. 523-551, 2022. 

‘Suriname: Nation Building and Nation Branding in a Postcolonial State, 1945-2015’, in: Viktorin, C. & et al. (eds), Nation branding in modern history, pp. 173-196, 2020. 

With Peter Meel, Departing from Java; Javanese labour, migration and diaspora, 288 p. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2018. 

‘In Suriname an Endless Refrain: Boom, Bust and Bouterse’, The Conversation, 30 May 2017. 

‘Indenture in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in: Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume IV, AD 1804-AD 2000, pp. 610-632. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.