

16-07-2025
KITLV invites scholars working in the fields of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies to apply for a Visiting Fellowship. Candidates are invited to send in a proposal of the work they wish to carry out while at KITLV. Fellows may work on a publication or research project of their own choice.
01-07-2025
Opinie: 'Nederland moet mooie woorden over gedeelde toekomst met Suriname waarmaken'. KITV onderzoeker Karwan Fatah-Black schreef met Feline Lucas (ASKV) een opiniestuk in de Volkskrant van 1 juli jl. over de speciale verblijfsregeling voor ongedocumenteerde Surinaamse oud-Nederlanders.
17-06-2025
Diana Suhardiman, KITLV director and special professor of Natural Resource Governance, Climate and Equity at Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies, Leiden University, received an ERC Advanced Grant of € 2.5 million.
The TASTE project is seeking a postdoctoral researcher. Deadline: 25 August 2025
KITLV invites scholars working in the fields of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies to apply for a visiting fellowship.
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The Members Association / Vereniging KITLV invites its members to actively contribute to realizing the goals of the Association.
The Members Association / Vereniging KITLV invites its members to contribute to maintaining and expanding its collection.
The KITLV is a research institute dedicated to the study of societal challenges, focusing on the histories and afterlives of colonialism in the Caribbean, Southeast Asia, and the Netherlands. Our aim is to produce quality research that furthers justice and envisions alternative futures beyond dominant perspectives.
Our research is informed by intimate familiarity with the cultures, histories, and languages of the places we study. Combining history, anthropology, archaeology, political science, linguistics, and the arts, our interdisciplinary perspective is critical and sensitive to marginalised voices.
Expensive elections campaigns are a threat to democracies around the world, because they generate corruption and political inequality. Yet, due to methodological obstacles and a western bias in the current literature, we do not really know what makes election campaigns expensive.
The islands and coastlines of Southeast Asia are home to Sea Nomads, including Moken/Moklen, Orang Laut, and Sama-Bajau, each with their own distinct yet related cultural identities, languages, and histories. For centuries, these groups have maintained a close relationship with the ocean, often living nomadic or semi-nomadic lives where their houseboat served as both homes and the primary means of sustenance.
The Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) has been commissioned by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture, and Science to advance international knowledge cooperation regarding the history of slavery in Indonesia, South Africa, and Suriname.
Driven by the increasing public awareness of the impact of hurricanes and the devastation of coastal areas, Island(er)s at the Helm contributes to equipping (Dutch) Caribbean societies with proficient tools for confronting these challenging climatic phenomena.
The TASTE Project, funded by the European Research Council and running from June 2024 to the summer of 2029, examines shifting food preferences and culinary change. Centered on three Indonesian diasporas, the project explores how people have adapted their culinary traditions to new environments in the past and continue to reshape them today. In doing so, we scrutinize how cultural, historical, social, economic, and environmental factors operate, intersect, and occasionally conflict in these transformations.
A project on the coloniality of Asian library and manuscript-formations. With KITLV Special Collections as point of departure, we study the social biographies of manuscripts, and the colonial histories of collecting, to gain insight into the role of violence therein, and to recognize local agency in the makings of so-called Asian Libraries.
Our publications
Drawing on a study of the lower reaches of the Nam Ou Basin in the Pak Ou and Nam Bak districts of Luang Prabang province in Laos, this paper explores how the social outcomes of a major hydropower project emerge from and are contingent upon long-term changes in livelihoods that can be dated back to the 1970s.
Our publications
A special issue on social media in Indonesia in the journal Indonesia, co-edited by KITLV researcher David Kloos, Merlyna Lim (Carleton University) and Johan Lindquist (Stockholm University).
Our publications
A special issue in Southeast Asia Research about village politics in Indonesia, which KITLV researcher Ward Berenschot edited with Linda Savirani, Arie Ruhyani (both UGM), and Edward Aspinall (ANU).
Our publications
Esther Captain en Urwin Vyent verzamelden in deze bundel belangrijke toespraken van o.a. Jet Bussemaker en Femke Halsema uitgesproken op de jaarlijkse herdenking van de afschaffing van de slavernij.
Our publications
This article looks at the literary representations of the flights of Holocaust refugees to the Caribbean. Refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe feature prominently in Caribbean novels.
Our publications
This book shows how the modern Dutch state and its predecessors were complicit in colonial slavery. It describes the roles of various actors in the Netherlands and the colonized societies.