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

Dries Lyna is a social and cultural 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 Histroy (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 the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

His current research interest lies in writing social histories of colonial cities, with a focus on eighteenth-century Sri Lanka and South Africa. In his new 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 the past he published on the urban Low Countries, with a focus on creative economies, art markets and material culture (late 17th -19th centuries).

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

He is the supervisor of PhD students Nicholas Michael Chow Sy (social mobility former slaves in 17th-century Manilla), Paul Van der Linde (land ownership former slaves 17th-century New Netherland, Cape Colony & Sri Lanka), Joël Edouard (information networks of the Dutch slave trade around the Indian Ocean World, 17th-18th centuries), Marie Keulen (formerly enslaved and religion 19th-century Surinam) and Pouwel van Schooten (social mobility manumitted slaves 17th-century Sri Lanka).

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