I am a cultural historian of law in Indonesia. My research projects connect the study of legal pluralism, materiality, Indonesian history and Dutch empire in the Indian Ocean world.
I am an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan. I received my PhD in History at Leiden University in 2018 with a dissertation on criminal law and mixed law courts in colonial Indonesia. For my postdoctoral research, I turned my attention to the long-term developments and implications of Dutch colonialism, in particular by unraveling the practices, erasures, and anxieties within encounters of law making by colonial commissions of inquiry in South- and Southeast Asia. My book project ‘Institutionalizing Uncertainty: Criminal Law and Strategies of Rule in Colonial Indonesia’ studies the materiality of law and strategies of legal pluralities inside—or kept outside of—mixed courtrooms in colonial Indonesia. This research project is an exploration of the actors, spaces, and materials of law in the colonial courtroom and foregrounds the uncertainty of colonial law as utilized and strategized through legal pluralities. In addition to a wide array of written sources, I explore the space of the courtroom by studying its materiality from photos and uniforms, to seating arrangements, batik, hats and table clothes. In my research, as well as teaching undergraduate and graduate students, I engage actively with the broader (legal) historiography on European empires, and the wider literature on law in the Indian Ocean world. I also research and teach on how present-day Europe, and especially the Netherlands, constructs, faces and contests its colonial legacies. Image: Landraad session in Batavia (staged in photo studio), oath taking by the penghulu, ca. 1890. (Leiden University Libraries, KITLV 90757) |