Marieke Bloembergen is a cultural historian and senior researcher at KITLV, and professor in Heritage and Postcolonial Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University’s Institute for History. Her research interests concern the political dynamics of cultural knowledge and art/heritage practices across the nature/culture divide, and the role of violence therein, in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia, and in local, inter-Asian and global dimensions. 

Her current book-project focuses on scholarly, spiritual and vegetarian knowledge networks between Indonesia, India and the West, and moral geographies of Greater India, 1880s-1990s. Next to that she is developing a new research line on more than human perspectives  and forms of violence in history and heritage (un)making, and practices of care across the culture/nature divide, to  understand what environmental empathy is, and can enable in (post-)colonial situations.

Educated in an interdisciplinary environment, amid historians and social scientists, Marieke Bloembergen's research is guided by the view that culture is political. She wrote her PhD-thesis on the Netherlands-Indies at the world exhibitions (1880-1931) at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School of Social Science Research, ASSR). As a post-doctoral researcher at Utrecht University she conducted a research project on the social history of policing and violence in the Netherlands Indies. She came at KITLV in 2008 as co-author and researcher of the NWO-funded Cultural Dynamics research program Sites, Bodies, and Stories; the dynamics of cultural heritage formation in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia – a collaborative program between Free University, NIOD and KITLV in the Netherlands and Gadjah Mada University and the Eijkman Institute in Indonesia.

Her most recent monograph, written together with Martijn Eickhoff, is The politics of heritage in Indonesia. A cultural history (Cambridge University Press, 2020). Bloembergen is also the author of  Colonial Spectacles: The Netherlands and the Netherlands-Indies at the world exhibitions, 1880-1931, (SUP, 2006). She published a monograph (2009) and several articles on policing and modernity, surveillance and perceptions of (in)security in colonial Indonesia.

Currently, Bloembergen is working on an objects-centred monograph on the history and makings of ‘Greater India’, and the significances this idea has garnered for networks of scholars, theosophists, collectors, pilgrims, vegetarians, and spiritual activists in Indonesia. In parallel, her research unfolds along a number of connected themes and interests.

Together with scholars and artists in Bandung she is developing a project on countercultural knowledge and political/environmental engagements in a Southeast Asian context. She is co-initiator and project leader of the research project ‘Unpacking KITLV Special Collections. Colonial histories, object biographies, knowledge practices, and local agency’. And she is a member of the interdisciplinary research project of SOAS-University of London, Circumambulating Objects: On Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art.

Since 2021, she is editor-in-chief of the Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania/ Bijdragen en Mededelingen voor de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI).

Selected Publications

Bloembergen, Marieke, and Martijn Eickhoff, The politics of heritage in Indonesia. A cultural history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. 

Bloembergen, Marieke, ‘While we were watching: Violence and the releasing of objects from Southeast Asian art and archaeology’, in: Ashley Thompson (ed.), Decoloniality and the purchase of the pre-Modern: Views from Southeast Asian fields, special issue Art History, pp. XX-XX,  forth. 2025.

Bloembergen, Marieke, Susie Protschky and Faizah Zakariah (eds.), 'Decolonizing “nature as subject”: Sites, histories, and legacies of environmental knowledge production in Indonesia', roundtable publication in BKI /Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Southeast Asia and Oceania, 181-1: 71-107, 2025. 

Bloembergen, Marieke, ‘Cats and the vegetarian dish in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia; Unsettling sources for environmental history,’ in: Sandra Swart, Iris van de Zande, Larissa Schulte Nordholt et al. (eds.), Gender and Animal History. Yearbook of Women’s History 42: 207-224. Amsterdam: AUP, 2024. Open access.  

Bloembergen, Marieke, and David Kloos (eds.), History and Anthropology, 34:5, special issue Unsettling encounters: Sites, knowledge exchange, and the making of religion in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean, 2023. 

Bloembergen, Marieke, 'Meditation matters: The politics and networks of yoga and spiritual reform between Indonesia, India, and the West, 1900s-1970s', History and Anthropology, 34:5 (2023), pp. 740-761, 2023. Open access. 

Bloembergen, Marieke, The burden of colonial things; Knowledge production, Indonesian perspectives, and the search for enlightenment, inaugural Lecture delivered by Marieke Bloembergen at the acceptance of the position of professor in Postcolonial and Heritage Studies in Indonesian History at Leiden University, on Wednesday 25 May 2022. Leiden University, 2022. 

Bloembergen, Marieke, ‘Lush lives; The peregrinations of Borobudur Buddhaheads, provenance and the moral economy of collecting’, IIAS Newsletter 92: 38-39, 2022,  Open access. 

Bloembergen, Marieke, ‘The politics of ‘Greater India’, a moral geography; Moveable antiquities and charmed knowledge networks between Indonesia, India and the West', Comparative Studies in Society and History 63-1: 170-211, 2021.

Bloembergen, Marieke, ‘The open ends of the Dutch empire and the Indonesian past; Decolonization, ‘Indic’ knowledge networks, and the problem of heritage across borders’, in: Martin Thomas and Andrew Thompson (eds.), Oxford Handbook on Ends of Empire, pp. 391-413. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018.

Bloembergen, Marieke,  ‘Borobudur in ‘the light of Asia’; Scholars, pilgrims and knowledge networks of Greater India, 1920s-1970s’, in: Michael Laffan (ed.), Belonging across the Bay of Bengal; Rites, migrations, rights, pp. 35-57. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. 

Bloembergen, Marieke, and Martijn Eickhoff, ‘The colonial archaeological hero reconsidered; Postcolonial perspectives on the ‘discovery’ of pre-historic Indonesia’, in Gisela Eberhardt and Fabian Link (eds.), Historiographical approaches to past archaeological research, 133-164. Berlin: Edition Topoi [Berlin Studies of The Ancient World 32], 2015.