I am a social and cultural historian specializing in the modern and contemporary Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. I study in particular societies that belong to the so-called Malay world, an area of long historical interactions between diverse populations, where the use of Malay as lingua franca has allowed the exchanges of ideas, concepts, and practices.

I specialize in 1) the cultural history of Islam in the region (the circulation of ideas, knowledge, and representations), particularly through the study of Malay manuscripts (content and material dimension); 2) the history of land ownership and the response of indigenous populations to colonial incursion (18th-20th centuries); 3) the history and memory of violence in contemporary Indonesia.

Historicizing cultural encounters

My general interest lies in understanding what cultural encounters mean for people when they took place – especially in the past – and how they have shaped the societies we know. In simpler terms, I like to think about what cultures and people do when they meet, and how groups make sense of those experiences in historical terms (local historiography).

Those questions – what happens when cultures, people, and languages meet, and what relation people built to the past – guide my teaching and research at the University of Hamburg (Asien-Afrika-Institut), where I am an associate professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia. The same interest has brought me to the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), where I am completing a book-long project on the evolution of land rights and ownership in British Malaya and Dutch East Indies, in the second half of the 19th century when Chinese, Arabs and European came to settle in great number.

Ethnic diversity and history writing

For my PhD, I have worked on the islamization of the Southern Philippines, and the circulation of ideas, practice and representation it brought into the region. I have then continued to nurtured a deep interest in the local history of Mindanao and Sulu, and its relation to the Malay speaking world.

By reversing the usual approach to the region, which is based on a global history/Indian Ocean studies perspective, I am now looking for ways to study the history of this “periphery” as a center in its own right. Mindanao and Sulu are two examples of sultanates in Southeast Asia that have been little studied in terms of their multi-ethnic and multi-religious dimensions (unlike other sultanates in other world regions). In the long term, I aim to write the history of these sultanates, beyond the conflicts, peace treaties, and life of their ports, in order to give an account of the lives of the different ethnic groups, Muslim and non-Muslim alike.

I have conducted fieldwork in The Philippines (Lanao, Cotabato, Zamboanga, Pantugan, Jolo, Tawi-Tawi), Indonesia (Aceh, Kerinci, Jakarta), and Malaysia (Sabah); and archival research in The Netherlands (former KITLV library), Spain (AGI, Sevilla), the UK (The British Library, the National Archives, the Royal Asiatic Society), Germany (Staatsbibliothek Berlin), the Philippines (National Archives, University Santo Tomas, Ateneo de Manila, the Archives of the Recolletos), Malaysia (Kedah, Johor, KL), Singapore, and Indonesia (ANRI, Jakarta). I look forward to returning to many of those places and some new ones as soon as time allows.