Aviva Ben-Ur

 Aviva Ben-Ur is Associate Professor in the Department of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. A Jewish historian by training, she received two Masters degrees from Columbia University (1992, 1994) and her Ph.D. from Brandeis University (1998). She is the author of Sephardic Jews in America: A Diasporic History (2009) and, with Rachel Frankel, Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries of Suriname: Epitaphs (2009) and Remnant Stones: The Jewish Cemeteries and Synagogues of Suriname: Essays (2012). Her current book project, Jewish Autonomy in a Slave Society: Suriname, 1651-1863, deals with the permeation of slavery into every aspect of colonial life. An offshoot of that project is the article she is researching and writing at the KITLV. Tentatively entitled “My Father, My Slave: Close-kin Ownership in Colonial Suriname,” this article explores the phenomenon whereby manumitted people owned their own family members, who often lived and labored under conditions no different than other slaves.

Farabi Fakih

Farabi Fakih is a lecturer at the History Department, Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada in Yogyakarta. He has also been working on his PhD dissertation at the History Department of Leiden University since 2009 and will defend his thesis on 14 May 2014. His PhD research focuses on the production of Indonesia’s managerial class during the 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. He analyses the rise of this new elite and its relationship to the rise of the New Order managerial state. Farabi obtained  his MPhil degree at the History Department of Leiden University writing about Javanese Nationalism. He obtained a cum laude for his MPhil, which was subsequently nominated a prize for best Master’s thesis on Asian Studies written in the Netherlands by the IIAS in 2009. Currently, Farabi is developing his ideas concerning liberalism and the ideas and forms of citizenship in Indonesia. This is partly a continuation of the ideas developed in his PhD dissertation. His research interest also include urban history, decentralization and the practices and ideas of development and developmentalism in Indonesian history.

Susie Protschky

Susie Protschky (PhD. 2007, University of New South Wales) is a Lecturer in Modern History at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She specialises in cultural histories of the Netherlands Indies, with a focus on visual culture and photography. She currently holds an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (ARC APD; 2010–2015). Susie is the author of the monograph Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (KITLV Press/Brill, 2011) and the editor of Photography, Modernity and the Governed in Late-Colonial Indonesia (Amsterdam University Press, forthcoming October 2014). She is currently writing a book titled Photographic Subjects: Monarchs, Commoners and the Camera, an historical investigation of popular photographic cultures surrounding the Dutch monarchy in the East Indies during the reign of Wilhelmina (1898–1948). Understanding how Wilhelmina was appealed to by her subjects through photography, and how she was mobilised in vernacular photographic practices to express colonial ethnic and class identities, sheds new light not only on the late colonial era in Indonesian history, but also on histories of colonialism and photography.