Daniel Blocq

Daniel Blocq is a PhD candidate in the sociology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In his research, he focuses on questions pertaining to political violence and collective action. His work has been published in journals such as Armed Forces and Society, Mobilization: An International Journal, and the Journal of Eastern African Studies. As a research fellow in Leiden, Daniel will lay the foundation for statistical analyses related to the project ‘Dutch Military Operations in Indonesia, 1945-1950’.

Isabelle Côté

Isabelle Côté received her PhD in Political Science from the University of Toronto, Canada, in 2014. Based on over nine-months of fieldwork, her dissertation examines the impact of internal migration on Sons of the Soil conflicts in China and Indonesia. At KITLV, she is part of the research project From Clients to Citizens, where she investigates the effect of internal migration on the concept of citizenship in Indonesia. She has published in the Journal of Ethnic and Racial Studies; Education, Citizenship and Social Justice; PS: Political Science and Politics and Asian Ethnicity.

Vaudine England

Vaudine England has been a journalist across South East Asia for years, working for Hong Kong, British and American media such as the BBC World Service and Far Eastern Economic Review. The jump from journalism to history-writing has not been a big one. In 1998, she published her first historical biography, The Quest of Noel Croucher: Hong Kong’s Quiet Philanthropist. After that England successively researched the history of the bilingual Chinese International School and the history of Hongkong Land, one of Hong Kong’s older companies and a subsidiary of former opium traders. She is currently writing the history of The Hong Kong Club, an archetypal institution of British empire, examining the creation of class and cliques on the China coast. A second, larger project is a detailed study of Eurasians and other mixed-race communities. This work aims to discover how and with what impact this crossing of race and class taboos worked in colonial Hong Kong and how it helped build a more cosmopolitan past than currently imagined.

Mirjam Künkler

Mirjam Künkler (Ph.D., Columbia University) is currently a Senior Research Fellow at KITLV. She is Assistant Professor in the Department for Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, USA, and has published on religion-state relations and Islamic thought in 20th century Iran and Indonesia. She has edited with Alfred Stepan, Democracy and Islam in Indonesia (2013), and with John Madeley and Shylashri Shankar, A Secular Age: Beyond the West (2014). Her articles have appeared or are forthcoming in various journals and edited volumes. In her next project she turns to questions about female religious authority in Islam. Künkler is co-PI of the two-year project entitled ‘Religion and Constitutionalism’ at the Institute of Advanced Study in Bielefeld, and of the ‘Iran Social Science Data Portal’ funded by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC).

Sraman Mukherjee

Sraman Mukherjee (PhD, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta) is Assistant Professor in the School of Historical Studies at Nalanda University (Rajgir, India). Trained as a historian of colonial South Asia his work explores the politics of heritage in colonial and early post-colonial South Asia looking at modern biographies of sites, objects, monuments, and disciplinary and institutional histories of archaeology and museums. Some of his published essays and articles include “From Sites and Museums to Temples: Relics, Ruins, and New Buddhist Viharas in Colonial India”(Archive Occasional Paper Series, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, No. 5, 2014), “Configuring Sacred Spaces: Archaeology, Temples and Monument Making in Colonial Orissa” (South Asian Studies, Vol. 29, No.1, 2013, pp. 15-29), “Between Religion and History: Afterlives of Buddhist Relics” (The Newsletter, IIAS, Leiden, Special Issue, No. 66, Winter 2013, p. 54), “Of Methods and Aims: The Field of Archaeology in Colonial India” (The Newsletter, IIAS, Leiden, No. 61, Autumn 2012, pp. 4 – 5), “Being and Becoming Indian: The Nation in Archaeology” (South Asian Studies, Vol. 26, No. 2, 2010, pp. 219-234), and “New Province Old Capital: Making Patna Pataliputra”(Indian Economic and Social History Review, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2009, pp. 241-279). At the KITLV Sraman will be working under the project Mobility and Identity with Dr. Marieke Bloembergen. His current research looks at transnational geographies of heritage and histories of Inter Asian interactions. His study focuses on object lives of Buddhist corporeal relics circulating across different institutional, political, and cultural locations across South and mainland Southeast Asia and Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.

Vilan van de Loo

Vilan van de Loo has a deep and ongoing passion for ladies novels from the Netherlands- Indies and their female writers. She studied Dutch Language and Literature at the University of Leiden (cum laude, 1993) and lives and works as an independent writer and researcher. She wrote a few biographies and defended in January 2014 her dissertation called Dochter van Indië. Melati van Java (1853-1927). This is the biography of (most likely) the first Eurasian female writer of the  Netherlands. More on Melati and these writers on: http://www.damescompartiment.nl/. “My dream, hope and desire is to write a handbook about these writers. We need more herstory in the history”. Do you know a name of an almost forgotten female writer about the Indies? Mail is most welcome: [email protected].

Astrid Norén-Nilsson

Astrid Norén-Nilsson obtained her PhD as a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge in May 2013 with a thesis on the role of nationalist imaginings, discourses and narratives in Cambodia since the 1993 introduction of a multi-party democratic system. She argued that the promotion of competing nationalistic imaginings is a much more prominent part of party political contestation in the Kingdom of Cambodia (KOC) than typically believed. Astrid commenced a 12-month fellowship at the KITLV in October 2013 joining the From Clients to Citizens project, in which she will reverse the perspective to look at Cambodia’s democratization from the point of view of emerging grassroots perceptions and practices of citizenship.  Alongside her research, Norén-Nilsson has also worked as a political risk consultant for various agencies since 2006.

Frank Okker

Frank Okker (Ph. D. Leiden University) published biographies of the writer-journalist Willem Walraven, Dirksland tussen de doerians – Amsterdam 2000, and the writer Madelon Székely-Lulofs, Tumult – Amsterdam 2008, reprinted in 2009. He writes articles related to literary history for a large number of newspapers and magazines. Frank is also active in the fiction field, his story Leidse liefde was published in 2007. At the KITLV he investigates the life and works of the adventurous scholar Gerret Pieter Rouffaer, founding father of the huge Asian collection of the institute that was recently transferred to the Leiden University Library. Frank published already several articles on Rouffaer, among others ‘Sherlock Holmes in Lebak’ (De Parelduiker, October 2010) and ‘Gerret weet het beter’ (In: Van felle kritiek tot feuilleton, Hilversum 2013). His biography Rouffaer, de laatste Indische ontdekkingsreiziger will come out in February 2015 at Boom Publishers in Amsterdam.

Patricia Tjiook-Liem

Patricia Tjiook-Liem obtained her Master of Laws at the University of Amsterdam. In 2009 she defended her Ph.D. dissertation on ‘The legal position of the Chinese in the Dutch East-Indies 1848-1942’ at Leiden University-Van Vollenhoven Institute. Previously her article ‘Fact and fiction on the Japanese Law’ was published in the legal magazine Rechtsgeleerd Magazijn Themis. This article dealt with the amendment of one of the most important articles of Dutch East-Indies’ constitutional law, an article directly related to the complex legal position of the Chinese in the colonial period. At present one of her main interests is the Chinese Indonesian Heritage Center (CIHC) of KITLV. The CIHC aims to collect and preserve the heritage of the Chinese in the Netherlands.