Colonialism on the Public Stage

Dr Hannah Goozee is a lecturer in the History of International Relations. Her research considers questions of conflict, violence, and trauma. She wrote her PhD on the politics of trauma in the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research reflects on issues relating to methodology and ethics, drawing upon intersectional and decolonial scholarship. Her work has been published in International Political Sociology and Social & Legal Studies. 

Hannah teaches across the disciplines of International Relations (IR) and Conflict Studies. Her courses address topics of violence, IR theory, colonialism, and research methods, among others. 

Sibo Rugwiza Kanobana (he/him) is assistant professor in cultural studies at the Open University of the Netherlands. He graduated with a PhD in sociolinguistics at Ghent University, an ethnographic study on race, language, masculinity and employment in Brussels. Between 2009 and 2013 he was a regular contributor to the Afro-Europe Blog and he is since 2018 an editor and writer for Rekto:Verso, the Belgian magazine on culture, critique, and society. Sibo co-wrote the book De bastaards van onze kolonie. Verzwegen verhalen van belgische metissen (2010), which addresses the silenced stories of mixed race children from Belgian Congo forced into adoption. In 2021 he published Zwarte Bladzijden. Afro-Belgische reflecties op Vlaamse (pos)koloniale literatuur, an anthology of essays that discusses Flemish colonial and postcolonial literature from a black perspective.

Dr George Hay is the Official Historian at the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC), an Honorary Academic at the University of Kent and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. He was previously Head of Military Records at The National Archives of the UK. He writes widely on the social history of British and Commonwealth armies in peace and war and authored the CWGC’s 2021 report on historical cases of non-commemoration. He is currently leading the research strand of the CWGC’s ongoing Non-Commemoration Project.

Dr. Cira Palli-Aspero, is a professional historian specialised in contemporary political history. Her work lies at the nexus of historiography and transitional justice with focus on state sanctioned historical commissions as mechanisms to address the legacies of the past. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Transitional Justice Institute at Ulster University. In her doctoral research she developed a theoretical and methodological framework for historical commissions operating in conflicted and divided societies. Her research findings are published in the monograph, “Clarification of the Past: Understanding Historical Clarification Commissions in Conflicted and Divided Societies” Routledge. Approaches to History book series.

As a BOF postdoctoral research fellow, Cira continues to develop her research on state-sanctioned historical commissions investigating what are the implications of framing post-colonial historical commissions (i.e., historical commissions operating in the post-colonial state) as instances of transitional justice in consolidated democracies.

Frank Gerits is Assistant Professor in the History of International Relations at Utrecht University, a research fellow at the University of the Free State and an external fellow at Shanghai University. He has published in journals such as Diplomatic History, African History and Cold War History. Together with Matteo Grilli he co-edited Visions of African Unity: New Perspectives on the History of Pan-Africanism and African Unification Projects, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). His book, The Ideological Scramble for Africa: How the Pursuit of Anticolonial Modernity shaped a Postcolonial Order, 1945-1966 will be published with Cornell University Press in March 2023.

Assistant Professor in History

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Rachel Gillett is a tenured Assistant Professor in Cultural History at Utrecht University, teaching modern Europe and empire. Her research focuses on race in France, on popular culture, and on the black Atlantic from a French perspective. Her book At Home In Our Sounds: Race, Music and Cultural Politics in Interwar Paris, (OUP 2021) examines questions that continue to inform her work: How can one be both black and French? Was/is black solidarity more important than national and colonial identity? How does gender intersect with "race"? And how does music-making function politically? She has also written about World War I and anticolonial activism. Her current research examines the role of Hip Hop in European politics and identity, as part of a broader engagement with the history of racialisation and belonging in Europe. Another research strand examines global perceptions of France as a land of liberty. 

Roel studied English Language and Culture at the Utrecht of Utrecht (with minors in Conflict Studies and Journalism) and International Relations in Historical Perspective, graduating with honours with a thesis on the Plantation Guard during the Indonesian war of independence (1945-1950). In May 2017 he successfully defended his thesis called ‘Collaboration is a Very Delicate Concept: Alliance-Formation and the Colonial Defence of Indonesia and Malaysia, 1945-1957’ at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy. This thesis is a case study in the interface of late European empires and colonized societies. Specifically, it investigates how the Dutch and British empires sought to recruit local supporters in Indonesia and Malaysia respectively and how these locals negotiated decolonization to their own ends and interests. 

After travelling through West Africa, I decided to study African history. For my doctoral dissertation I conducted fieldwork in the southern region of Senegal, a part of the country claimed by an armed separatist movement. Researching masquerading, I found that the object of my research was defined as secret by my interlocutors. I became more interested in anthropological understandings of the practice of secrecy and how this practice enables people to produce locality in an increasingly globalising world. This is when my academic orientation shifted towards anthropology. My doctoral dissertation demonstrates how people engage modernity on their own terms through secretive performances. Since masquerading is a form of performance, I was happy to take up the opportunity to teach African art and performance at the School of Art History and World Art Studies. Here I developed new interests in art, performance and memory. I became interested in heritage, as one of the masquerades I had researched in Senegal was declared UNESCO World Heritage. At present, I am developing research and teaching in the archive and postcolonial futures.

Peter Malcontent is a well-known and recognized specialist on the history of human rights and Dutch foreign policy in that field. He has published many books and articles on both topics like Facing the Past. Amending Historical Injustices through Instruments of Transitional Justice (Intersentia, 2016) and Een open zenuw. Nederland, Israël & Palestina [An Open Nerve. The Netherlands, Israel & Palestine] (Boom, 2018).

Gillian Mahtys is Historian of Great Lakes and Assistant Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. She also works as a Fed-twin researchers in the Belgian State Archives.

Dr. Van Beurden earned her undergraduate degree from the University of Leuven in Belgium, and het Ph.D. in History from the University of Pennsylvania. She is a historian of modern African and transnational history, with a focus on the cultural history of colonial and postcolonial central Africa. She is interested in the ways culture is constructed, represented, and used in political contexts and has published on the history of museums, art restitution, decolonization, heritage and conservation politics, as well as the history of anthropology and art history. Her book, Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture (New African Histories Series, Ohio University Press, 2015) investigates the role of museum politics in the legitimation of the Belgian colonial regime and the postcolonial Mobutu regime in Congo/Zaire. It tells a history of decolonization as a struggle over cultural categories, the possession of cultural heritage, and the right to define and represent cultural identities. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Journal of African History, History and Anthropology, Critical Intervent

Simon Nsielanga Tukumu is a doctoral student working on decolonization discourses and practices within the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) in Congo/Zaire, 1960-2000. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from the Saint Peter Canisius Faculty of Philosophy in Kimwenza, DRC, an MA in History from the University of Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, and an MA in Theology, Social Ethics, from the University of Santa Clara, Berkeley, USA. He is also interested in the invention of Africans’ self-confidence after western colonization, the history of unknown Africa’s minority ethnic groups and the history of peace-building in Africa. 

Chiara Candaele has obtained her master's degree in History at the University of Antwerp in 2016. Since October 2016, she has been a PhD candidate at the University of Antwerp, where she is preparing a dissertation on practices of transnational child displacements (Belgium, 1960-2000). Her research aims to unravel the links between power and care and she is interested in the history of family planning, parent- and motherhood and postcolonial migration. 

Chiara Candaele is member of the research group Power in History (University of Antwerp) and is affiliated with the COAC network (Children as Objects and Actors of (post-)Colonial Change) at the University of Amsterdam. 

chilling’s first book, Postcolonial Germany (Oxford University Press, 2014) has been called ‘essential reading for anyone interested in the history and legacy of German colonialism’ (David Ciarlo, Central European History), a ‘compact, intelligent, elegantly written book’ (Lora Wildenthal, European History Quarterly) and ‘an excellent study…[that] will, one hopes, mark the beginning of a wider reassessment of the historical legacy of Germany’s colonial adventure (Alexander Clarkson, English Historical Review).

Her further work draws on a range of archival sources – from foreign office and national archives to the holdings of missionary organisations – which she combines with oral history and the analysis of visual and material culture, including architecture. Her research has enabled her to travel extensively, from Swakopmund in Namibia to SOAS in London, from Aix-en-Provence to Berlin, and even down the road to Het Utrechts Archief. In her classes on the history of empire and colonial memory, she aims to give students a solid grounding in empirical research, whilst cultivating the flexibility to think beyond the traditional archive.

As historian I am working on the afterlife of historical injustice (World War II, colonialism, slavery) in todays society, the relation between memory, identity and justice. My PhD theorized the concept of family memory (Das Familiengedächtnis der Wittgensteins), further developed in my Post-doc The afterlife of restitution, examining how former victims of National Socialism and their families experienced Austria’s compensation practices: analysing the dynamics between family memory and reparation policies. With my Marie Curie research on Narrated (In)Justice I moved from Holocaust and Memory Studies into Transitional Justice; exploring reparations to Dutch Jewry and post-colonial groups next to each other, showing how narratives of (in)justice are re-narrated across generations. Supported by a NWO-ASPASIA I explored the ‘Rawagede case’, a court case on Dutch military actions in Indonesia, with the puzzling question: ‘How to acknowledge colonial injustice?’ To date I focused on reparation questions in regard to historical injustice. My new project on Dialogics of Justice allows me to explore with an interdisciplinary team how recognition and repair works across cases.