Wednesday 17 June 2026

How have the Javanese, in the course of history, engaged with their own past? What kinds of past were important to specific communities, and how did they go about retrieving and recording it? And what can these processes tell us about the relationship between these historical imaginations on the one hand and understandings of temporality, textuality, and metaphysics on the other? 

Vrijdag 26 juni 2026

In 2026 viert het KITLV haar 175-jarig bestaan. We vieren en reflecteren op de afgelopen kwart eeuw met een Publieksfestival op 26 juni 2026.

Thursday 2 July 2026

This summer, Professor Rosemarijn Hoefte will retire as senior researcher and member of the management team at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), and as professor in the history of Suriname after 1873 in comparative perspective at the University of Amsterdam. Throughout her academic career, Rosemarijn has made an invaluable contribution to the field of Caribbean Studies: as a researcher, institute manager, editor-in-chief of the New West Indian Guide, and President of the Association of Caribbean Historians.

Tuesday 14 July 2026

This talk examines the work of building contractors—referred to as aannemers/anémers—in Indonesia from the early to mid-twentieth century. It focuses on Bandung-based family entrepreneurs of ethnic Chinese Sundanese descent who worked with Dutch architects and plantation interests during the late Dutch colonial period, and later with Indonesian engineers in the early Indonesia's post-Independence era.