Research projects
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Trust in the Balance? Interpersonal Credit at the Cape
How did trust and social networks shape economic growth in colonial Cape Town, and how did credit work as a social system? This project reveals how people used personal relationships to access opportunities, resolve disputes, and navigate inequality.
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In God we Trust? Unmarried Women in the Cape Colony
How did unmarried women build support networks in the church-shaped society of 18th-century Cape Town? This project shows how women (free, manumitted, and enslaved) helped secure trust, care, and social recognition for themselves and their children.
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Economies of Trust?
Who could be trusted in a deeply unequal, cosmopolitan society? This project looks beyond colonial paper realities to reconstruct bottom-up social networks in the 18th-century Cape Colony and how these were performed vis-a-vis formal institutions.
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Colonial Governmentality and Missionary Practices of Child Upbringing in Suriname, 1830-1930
This PhD project investigates policies and practices of child upbringing by missionary organisations in 19th and early 20th century colonial Suriname.
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Unsetling Sources
In the 1940s and 1950s, children’s homes in Indonesia were hazardous, prompting many to seek refuge in the Netherlands. This project examines sensitive records from that time to understand their impact on the Indisch community.
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Black America and Europe
This project analyses the ways notions and images of ‘Black America’ play a role in which Europeans understand racism and Black European activism.
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Colonialism Inside Out
This interdisciplinary project focuses on how ordinary people in Sri Lanka experienced and navigated normative institutions of taxation, legal action and religion that were set up by the Dutch East India Company (VOC).
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Towards a Virtual Slave Island
Downtown Colombo has been one of the fastest-growing cities in South Asia. This project moves beyond the changes in the built environment, by foregrounding the untold life stories of past and present inhabitants of the suburb.
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Neel Doff’s translingual urban wanderings
This project researches the reception of Neel Doff's Keetje trilogy and her position as a transnational author.
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Child separation
This project examines the scope, spread and development of faith‐based child separation in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia (1808‐1984).
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Belonging, Representation, Creolization
Focussing on the social and cultural history of baseball in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, this research project analyzes how the sport has played a role in processes of belonging, discrimination and exclusion.
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The Paramaribo Ward Registers
In this project data from the Paramaribo Ward Registers (1828-1846) will be made available as a FAIR database that can be used for both scholarly research and by a wider public for family history.
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Imperial Pasts in Contemporary Comics
This PhD-project investigates how contemporary comics co-construct or challenge the dominant cultural archives of colonialism in the Netherlands and Germany.
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Recognizing Extracted Entities for the Historical Database Suriname Curacao
A team of the Historical Database Suriname and Curacao is developing a method to integrate automated handwritten text recognition (HTR) technology and entity recognition into the workflow.
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North American Indigenous Soldiers in the Netherlands during WWII
The research project aims to identify and describe the participation of North American indigenous soldiers in the Netherlands during World War II.
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Humor and Violence in Contemporary Latin American Literature
In this book project Brigitte Adriaensen analyses how contemporary Latin American literature uses different types of humour (black humour, parody, irony, cynicism) in the representation of violence.
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Poison, Medicine or Magic Potion?
The main aim of this project is to analyse the changing perceptions of 'drugs' in Latin America from the continent’s independence to our present day (1820-2020). The project focuses on the representation of ayahuasca, peyote and coca(ine).
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Legacies of Bondage
This project will involve the construction of a database of the Surinamese population that existed between 1830 and 1950. It will combine the individual records of both enslaved, bonded labourers from China, India and Indonesia and free citizens.