Nomiki Karellaki is a Master’s student in Cultural History & Heritage at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on sea nomadic communities in Southeast Asia under Spanish colonialism in the 18th century.

Nomiki Karellaki is a Master’s student in Cultural History & Heritage at Utrecht University. Her research focuses on sea nomadic communities in Southeast Asia under Spanish colonialism in the 18th century. She examines through Spanish colonial archival material related to the Philippines how maritime communities particularly Sama-Bajau have been historically marginalized and excluded from dominant colonial narratives. Her work pays attention to the ways mobility, maritime mode of life are represented and categorized within colonial records.

She has a Bachelor’s degree in History and Archaeology from the University of Ioannina with specialization in Archaeology. Throughout her studies, she was enthusiastic about art history and one of her research projects that she explored was on surrealism and cross-dressing. She explored the relationship between art, identity and politics by examining how artistic practices challenged dominant norms around gender and identity. In this way, she is shaping her broader interest in the question of representation and social exclusion.

Her research interests include colonial and postcolonial history, marginality, identity and the construction of historical narratives. She is particularly interested in how archival sources both produce knowledge and silence certain histories, especially in relation to mobile or non-sedentary communities.

As an intern at KITLV under TRACE Project (March to May 2026), she is further developing her research on the Sama-Bajau by looking into Spanish colonial sources and scholarships on Southeast Asia with focus on how maritime mobility and social difference were understood and framed within colonial systems with particular attention to how colonial categories shaped the visibility of maritime communities.