26-08-2025

Esther Captain will take the chair, endowed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW), at Utrecht University's Department of History and Art History on September 1, 2025. 

Dutch version

Her work will deal with the long-term impact of colonialism and slavery in the Netherlands, Indonesia, Suriname, the Dutch Caribbean islands and South Africa, with a specific focus on how experiences and memories of these systems have been transmitted from generation to generation.

The chair’s key question is currently debated both in academia and wider society: What impact, if any, do slavery and colonialism have on subsequent generations? Such impact, often referred to as “afterlives” of slavery and colonialism, can pertain to a spectrum of people from divergent backgrounds, such as the descendants of enslaved people, plantation owners, abolitionists and colonial administrators, both in the metropole and in former colonial societies.

Short bio

Esther Captain is a historian and senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. She is a member of the committee investigating the Royal House and its colonial history, a study initiated by King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands. Dr. Captain also coordinates a Dutch government-sponsored program for international knowledge cooperation on the legacy of slavery and its continued impact in Suriname, South Africa, and Indonesia. Previously, she led a project on the role of the Dutch state in colonial slavery, which resulted in the book Staat en Slavernij (2023)/ Slavery and the Dutch State (2025). Captain was also project leader of Independence, Decolonization, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945–1950, a research program which resulted in Het geluid van geweld (2022)/ Resonance of Violence (2025).