Dr D.B.G.W. Lyna (Dries)

Dries Lyna is a socio-economic historian of the 17th and 18th centuries, interested in VOC settlements across the Indian Ocean World. He defended his PhD at the Centre for Urban History (University of Antwerp), and went to Duke University and the Getty Research Institute as Fulbright Visiting Scholar. He has been a guest lecturer at the Free University of Brussels and the Institut d'Etudes Supérieures des Arts in Paris, and Visiting Scholar at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His current research interest lies in writing socio-institutional histories of colonial cities, with a focus on eighteenth-century Sri Lanka and South Africa. In his project 'Displaced Forgetting' he studies family histories of formerly enslaved under Dutch and British rule in Sri Lanka and South Africa, together with Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University). In addition, he leads the international Gerda Henkel Foundation-project 'Economies of Trust' on social networks of the urban poor in the 18th-century Cape Colony, together with Eva Marie Lehner (University of Bonn) and Wouter Ryckbosch (Vrije Universiteit Brussel/Ghent University).

He is the coordinator of the Ba-programma 'Comparative European History' and coordinates the RICH research group 'Colonial Relations & Structures'. Within the N.W. Posthumus Research School for Economic and Social History he is member of the General Board and the research director of the network 'Routes & Roots in Colonial and Global History'.

He is the supervisor of PhD students Nicholas Chow Sy (social mobility former slaves in 17th-century Manilla), Paul Phillip van der Linde (land ownership former slaves 17th-century New Netherland, Cape Colony & Sri Lanka), Marie Keulen (formerly enslaved and religion 19th-century Surinam), Wouter Raaijmakers (legal strategies and social identities Dutch/British Sri Lanka & South Africa) and Pouwel van Schooten (social mobility manumitted slaves 17th-century Sri Lanka).