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Hoefte, Prof. dr. Rosemarijn

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Rosemarijn Hoefte is a historian specialized in the Caribbean. She is Professor in the history of Suriname after 1873 in comparative perspective at the University of Amsterdam. Her main research interests are the history of postabolition Suriname, migration and unfree labor, and contemporary Caribbean history. Her current projects are ‘Departing from Java’, ‘Empire and Transnationalism’, and a study of Surinamese social activist and politician Grace Schneiders-Howard.

Rosemarijn Hoefte studied History at Leiden University, and Latin American Studies (MA 1982) and History (PhD 1987) at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Her dissertation was on British Indian and Javanese indentured labor on the largest plantation in Suriname. In 2006 she received a four-year NWO grant to study the history of twentieth-century Suriname. The synthesis of this research project, Suriname in the long twentieth century, was published in 2014. In 2010, she coordinated a three-country oral history project on the cultural heritage of Surinamese Javanese. In recent years she (co-)organized workshops on (post)colonial biographies (University of Groningen, 2007), the Three Guianas: Similarities and differences (KITLV 2013), and the Javanese diaspora (Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta 2013). In addition to monographs and edited volumes, she has published more than 70 articles on the Caribbean and Latin America in scholarly books and journals, and the popular press.

Rosemarijn has wide-ranging research interests. In ‘Departing from Java’ on the Javanese diaspora she focuses on Javanese labor, migration, and diaspora as a global phenomenon. She also is working on a study of the life and times of Grace Schneiders-Howard, a social activist and the first female politician in Suriname. Hoefte is charge of the KITLV Publication program with Brill Academic Publishers and she is the managing editor of the New West Indian Guide, the oldest journal on the Caribbean. Currently she serves as president of the Association of Caribbean Historians (ACH).

Selected Publications

‘In Suriname an Endless Refrain: Boom, Bust and Bouterse’, The Conversation, 30 May 2017

‘Indenture in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in: Seymour Drescher, David Eltis, and Stanley L. Engerman (eds), Cambridge World History of Slavery Volume IV, AD 1804-AD 2000, pp. 610-632. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

(With Matthew Louis Bishop and Peter Clegg, eds), Post-Colonial Trajectories in the Caribbean: The Three Guianas. London: Routledge, 2017.

‘Orang-kontrak: De verbeelding van Javaanse contractarbeiders in Suriname en Deli’, Acta Neerlandica 12:145-171, 2016.

‘Locating Mecca: Religious and political discord in the Javanese community in pre-independence Suriname’, in: Aisha Khan (ed.), Islam and the Americas, pp. 69-91. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2015.

Suriname in the long twentieth century; Domination, contestation, globalization. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

‘Learning, loving, and living in early twentieth-century Suriname; The movement of people and ideas from East to West’, Journal of Caribbean History 45-2 (2011): 190-211.

(With Leo Dalhuisen, Ronald Donk, and Frans Steegh [eds]), Geschiedenis van de Antillen; Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Eustatius, Sint Maarten. Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2009.

(With Peter Meel [eds]), Twentieth-century Suriname; Continuities and discontinuities in a New World society. Kingston: Ian Randle/Leiden: KITLV Press, 2001.

In place of slavery; A social history of British Indian and Javanese laborers in Suriname. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1998.

Click here for the full publication list.

Research output & activities (KNAW research portal – PURE).