Abubakar, Myra

Myra completed her PhD at The Australian National University’s School of Culture, History, and Language. Her thesis, A study of female heroism in Indonesia, examines the evolution of female heroism in Indonesia from the nineteenth century to the present, exploring its cultural and political significance. As a lecturer, she taught Indonesian studies, language, and culture at ANU, DFAT, and various institutions in Canberra.

Myra is currently a visiting fellow at KITLV, where she continues her research on the hero phenomenon in Indonesia: ‘Reimagining female heroes in the Hikayat of Aceh’.

Dressler, Wolfram

Dressler’s research involves the scalar politics of conservation and development that encompass environmental governance, agrarian change, rural livelihoods, and ethnic relations in insular and mainland Southeast Asia. His current work broadly examines the political ecology of local social responses and livelihood adjustments emerging at the conjuncture of changing environmental governance, resource extraction (mining, plantations, etc), and agrarian political economies in the frontiers of the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam and Laos. Wolfram has researched similar topics in the Canadian Western Arctic, Eastern Caribbean and Southern Africa.

During his affiliated fellowship at KITLV, Wolfram will complete and present research on the gendered dimensions of land defenders in the Philippines, a conceptual paper on yield gap politics, and finalise the publication of his new book For the Sake of Forests and God (Cornell University Press). More information.

Jaelani, Gani

Gani A. Jaelani earns his doctoral degree in history from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris, with dissertation entitled La question de l’higiène aux Indes-Néerlandaise: les enjeux médicaux, culturels et sociaux (The question of hygiene in the Dutch East Indies: Issues on medicine, culture and social) in 2017. He has published a book titled Civilisatie/Syphilisatie: Penyakit Kelamin di Jawa, 1814-1942 – Civilisatie/Syphilisatie: The Venereal Disease in Java, 1814-1942 (2024) and articles in journals and media about the history of medicine. Now he teaches history at the Department of History and Philology, Universitas Padjadjaran, Indonesia, while conducting research on the history of sciences and medicines in colonial Indonesia. He is also the main editor of a Bandung-based independent publication, Pustaka Pias.

Gani is currently a visiting fellow at KITLV where he works on biochemical issues and the intersection between religion, class, and race in late colonial and early postcolonial Indonesia: ‘The bodies that built the nation: Biochemical research in late colonial and early postcolonial Indonesia’.

Jagt, van der Hans

Hans van der Jagt obtained his PhD from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam with a dissertation on the historical relationship between geopolitics, colonialism, militarism and ethics. He studied History at the University of Groningen and the Karl-Franzens Universität in Graz (Austria). Currently dr. Hans van der Jagt works as a associate senior research fellow at KITLV on the research-project ‘The role of the House of Orange-Nassau in colonial history’ and as a associate senior research fellow at the Institute of Security and Global Affairs of Leiden University. Furthermore he works for the Peace and Security Commission of the Advisory Council on International Affairs.

In his work Van der Jagt focuses on the history of colonial structures of power, geopolitical developments, military and international security strategy, defense-policy and emerging disruptive technologies. He wrote academic articles, government research-reports, and policy briefs and published the book Engelen uit Europa (Prometheus, Amsterdam 2022).

Matthee, Mariëlle

Mariëlle Matthee studied English literature at the University of Liverpool and she is a lecturer at Leiden University. Mariëlle has a background in environmental law (PhD in international law) and combines the legal perspective with literature in her research. During her last research, she focused on the Maori language language in New Zealand, and rediscovered the importance of indigenous cultures and languages and their use of poetic language to safeguard nature.

Her current project, which will run from September 2024 to September 2025, uses an esoteric approach to explore the ways of nonhuman communication in environmental governance.

Setijawati Soemarwi, Vera Wheni

Vera has started her career as an advocate. Her work focuses on access to justice and collective legal movement within the context of  climate-related water management in an urban context. She has been involved in research on violations of human rights, land rights, properties, and development for the public interest. Her prior work has brought her to write research topics in those areas.

She is currently working on a PhD dissertation about access to justice for marginalized people facing climate-related water management issues in Jakarta, with Diana Suhardiman (KITLV) and Adriaan Bedner (VVI/KITLV) as supervisors. Her research focuses on marginalized communities’ efforts to seeking justice through collective action and social movements when they become victims of climate change adaptation programs. It looks at the process of enforcing and implementing the rule of law in the development of water development program in Jakarta, in response to climate change, and its relations with public interest. She is currently researching the contestation of debates between legal and illegal kampong dwellers, informal settlements, and informal land tenure ownership of urban communities. The book is a reflection of marginalized communities’ involvement in Jakarta to vindicate and achieve justice in resettlement of kampung dwellers.

Tulder, Mirelle van

Mirelle van Tulder is the Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed Artist in Residence for 2024. Mirelle will start her residency in 2024 followed by a public presentation in 2025 at Framer Framed.Mirelle van Tulder holds an MA in Fine Art and Design from Werkplaats Typografie (2021-2023). She was a Research Associate at the Research Center for Material Culture, Wereldmuseum (2021-2023). Mirelle has worked as an image researcher for MacGuffin Magazine from 2019-2023.

During the Atelier KITLV-Framer Framed Artist in Residence program, Mirelle plans to investigate how graphic design has determined the classification of cultures and objects. By re-contextualizing archived materials such as catalogues and photo albums, she aims to reclaim the authority of the material and its associated histories. The aim of her research is to help us understand how power is organized through publishing doctrines, and to reveal the colonising principles that structure them. More.

Vermeulen, Remco

Remco Vermeulen is coordinator for international cooperation on collection management at the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, working on knowledge exchange and capacity building programmes in the context of the International Heritage Cooperation programme which is part of the International Cultural Policy of the Netherlands, as well as for the Consortium Colonial Collections.

Remco is an external PhD candidate at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Sciences. His research focuses on colonial heritage engagement, particularly by young people, in postcolonial Indonesian cities. His teaching focuses on gentrification, colonial and postcolonial urbanism, particularly in Indonesia, the bilateral, cultural relationship between Indonesia and the Netherlands. For his previous position as advisor for cultural cooperation with Indonesia at DutchCulture, in 2023 Remco published article series ‘The story of the Erasmus Huis’, the cultural centre of the Dutch Embassy in Jakarta, with two Indonesian historians. The articles, along with short videos based on the articles’ content, have also been published in Indonesian on Historia.id.

Vlugt, Debby Esmeé de

Debby Esmeé de Vlugt is a lecturer in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University and an affiliated fellow at the KITLV in September and October 2024. She specializes in the global history of the Black Power movement, with a key interest in transnational exchanges between activists in the United States and the Kingdom of the Netherlands (including the former Netherlands Antilles and Suriname) in the 1960s and 1970s. She recently defended her PhD on this topic at Leiden University (2024) and before that completed an MSt in History at the University of Oxford (2017).

During her affiliated fellowship at the KITLV, Debby Esmeé will be working on an edited volume titled A History of Surinamese Anticolonial Thought: Resistance, Resilience, and Decolonial Imagination in the Twentieth Century, which she is co-editing with Peter Meel. Each chapter of this volume will cover at least one anticolonial thinker from Suriname or the Surinamese diaspora, ranging from political organizers to visual artists, authors, and poets. The aim of this volume is to demonstrate the diversity and complexity of the Surinamese anticolonial tradition and make its history more accessible to an international audience. The volume will be published by Bloomsbury and is expected to appear in 2026.