Contributors

Sadiah Boonstra is a historian and curator based in Jakarta, where she is CEO and founder of CultureLab Consultancy Indonesia, a postdoctoral researcher at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Sadiah was previously collections and curatorial specialist at the Indonesian Heritage Agency, Asia scholar at the University of Melbourne, curator of public programs at Asia TOPA Melbourne, senior manager of programs at National Gallery Singapore, a postdoctoral fellow at Royal Holloway University London and the British Museum, and a fellow at the Alliance for Historical Dialogue and Accountability, Institute for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University, New York.

Bronwyn Anne Beech Jones teaches gender and Southeast Asian history at the University of Melbourne, where she completed her PhD in 2024 supported by the Hansen Scholarship in History. Her doctoral research examined women’s and girls’ self-fashioning in early twentieth-century Sumatra through three women’s newspapers. Bronwyn’s primary research interests are everyday life, gender, education, resistance and literary practices in colonial Indonesia. She is a member of the steering committee for the University of Melbourne’s History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective.

Katharine McGregor is Professor of Southeast Asian History in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. Kate has researched many topics related to Indonesian history and struggles with memory and violence from the colonial period through to the present. Her most recent book is Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory, and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (Critical Human Rights Series, University of Wisconsin Press, 2023). Kate is also a research lead for the University of Melbourne’s History, Memory and Decolonial Futures Research Collective.

Ken M.P. Setiawan is Senior Lecturer in Indonesian Studies at the Asia Institute, University of Melbourne, and an associate at the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society at the Melbourne Law School. Ken was born in Indonesia and grew up primarily in the Netherlands, where she studied Indonesian language followed by a Master of Arts in Southeast Asian Studies and a PhD in law at Leiden University. Ken’s main research interests are the politics of human rights in Indonesia. Her most recent book, co-authored with Dirk Tomsa, is Politics in Contemporary Indonesia: Institutional Change, Policy Challenges and Democratic Decline (Routledge, 2022).

Abdul Wahid is a lecturer in the Department of History, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. From 2017 to 2021, he was also a KITLV postdoctoral researcher. His research interests include the following themes: the political and economic history of colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, the social dimensions of violence in modern Indonesia (the revolutionary period of 1945–50 and 1965–66) and sociopolitical issues of minorities, particularly the Chinese in colonial and postcolonial Indonesia.

Ajeng Ayu Arainikasih is pursuing a PhD at Leiden University in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on decolonisation and museums in postcolonial Indonesia. Ajeng is a lecturer at the University of Indonesia and is the founder and Lady Boss of Museum Ceria, an independent museum consultancy based in Jakarta. Her major and recent academic publications are, written collaboratively with Adrian Perkasa, ‘Looking Back from the Periphery: Situating Indonesian Provincial Museums as Cultural Archives in the Late-Colonial to Post-Colonial Era’ (Wacana 24, no. 3 [2023]) and ‘A Story of Entanglement between Indonesian National Heroes, Museums, and Decolonization’ (ICOFOM Study Series 52, no. 1 [2024]).

F.X. Harsono is a prominent Indonesian artist whose work explores the role of artists in society and claims for recognition and justice. Harsono’s work focuses on self-identity, working directly with the Chinese Indonesian community of his ancestry to document their stories in a variety of media, including film. Harsono was awarded the 2014 Prince Claus Award honouring his ‘crucial role in Indonesia’s contemporary art scene for forty years’ and, in 2015, the Joseph Balestier Award for the Freedom of Art. His work has been shown in more than 100 exhibitions around the world.

Brigitta Isabella is a researcher, curator and editor, who navigates her encounters with people, objects and discourses through various knowledge-production platforms that operate at the intersection of art history, critical theories and cultural activism. She has been affiliated with a self-organised research group based in Yogyakarta, the Kunci Study Forum, since 2011 and is a member of the editorial collective of the peer-reviewed journal Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art. She teaches in the Visual Arts Department, Indonesia Institute of the Arts Yogyakarta.

Michael Karabinos is a lecturer in Archival Studies in the Media Studies Department at the University of Amsterdam. From 2023 to 2024, he was a member of the Dutch Council for Culture’s committee on colonial archives. Previously he was a Deviant Practice Research Fellow at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, researching within the museum’s archive and curating exhibitions using its material. In 2021 he joined the Collecting Otherwise working group at the Nieuwe Instituut’s National Collection of Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Abidin Kusno is professor in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, Toronto, and former director of the York Centre for Asian Research. His publications include Visual Cultures of the Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) and Jakarta: The City of a Thousand Dimensions (NUS Press, 2023).

Grace T. Leksana is assistant professor in Indonesian history in the Cultural History section of Utrecht University, Netherlands. She is the author of Memory Culture of the Anti-Leftist Violence in Indonesia: Embedded Remembering (Amsterdam University Press, 2023). Since 2007 she has been working on the issue of state violence in Indonesia, particularly the anti-leftist violence in 1965. Her interests cover memory studies, oral history, histories of the Left, (de)colonisation and knowledge production.

Susie Protschky is Professor of Global Political History at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her current book project is a history of colonial war photography in Indonesia titled Seeing Like a Soldier: Photography and Colonial War Photography in Dutch Indonesia. Her previous book, Photographic Subjects: Monarchy and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (Manchester University Press, 2019), won the Asian Studies Association of Australia and the Royal Studies Journal book prizes. She is also the author of Images of the Tropics: Environment and Visual Culture in Colonial Indonesia (KITLV Press/Brill, 2011).

Ravando is the inaugural John Legge Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash University, Melbourne. He received his PhD from the University of Melbourne in 2023. Before this, he taught history at Universitas Gadjah Mada, Indonesia. His doctoral thesis examined the Chinese Indonesian newspaper Sin Po (1910–65) as a lens to explore political movements and transnational connections of Chinese Indonesian society in the Dutch East Indies. Ravando’s monographs include Perang Melawan Influenza: Pandemi Flu Spanyol di Indonesia Masa Kolonial, 1918–1919 (The War Against Influenza: The Spanish Flu Pandemic in Colonial Indonesia, 1918–19) (Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2020) and Merawat Kehidupan: 100 Tahun Rumah Sakit Husada (Jang Seng Ie) (Nurturing Life: A Centennial of Husada/Jang Seng Ie Hospital) (Penerbit Buku Kompas, 2025).

Ronit Ricci is the Sternberg-Tamir Chair in Comparative Cultures and a professor in the departments of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She is also affiliated with The Australian National University. Her main academic interests are Javanese and Malay manuscript cultures, translation studies and Indonesian literature. She is the author of Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (University of Chicago Press, 2011) and Banishment and Belonging: Exile and Diaspora in Sarandib, Lanka and Ceylon (Cambridge University Press, 2019). She edited Exile in Colonial Asia: Kings, Convicts, Commemoration (University of Hawai`i Press, 2016) and Storied Island: New Explorations in Javanese Literature (Brill, 2023).

I Ngurah Suryawan lectures in the Anthropology Department at the University of Papua in Manowkari, West Papua Province. His PhD thesis, ‘Siasat Elit Mencuri Kuasa: Dinamika Pemekaran Daerah di Papua Barat [Elite Strategies for Stealing Power: The Dynamics of Regional Expansion in West Papua]’, was completed at Universitas Gadjah Mada in 2015. His postdoctoral research focuses on the ‘Cultural Ecology and Dynamics of Natural Resources in Marine Communities Merauke, Papua’ (ANU-ELDP London, 2016–17) and ‘The Making of Local Elites in West Papua 1961–1998’ (KITLV Netherlands, 2017–18). He is currently working on comparative studies on indigenous peoples and natural resources exploitation in West Papua and Bali.

Rika Theo is an archivist, librarian and researcher working on the silences in the Indonesian displaced archives. She received an OnsArchief archival fellowship in 2022 to research problematic custody and hidden narratives of the Indonesian Left archives in the Netherlands. Previously a journalist in Jakarta, she won a scholarship to study in the Netherlands, obtaining her MA in international political economy, an MA in archival studies and a PhD in international development. She is a librarian at the University of Amsterdam and an archivist at the International Institute of Social History. She is also involved with the activist group Watch65.