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I am an Assistant Professor in Global Arts and Politics in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Currently, I am working on my monograph entitled “I Own, Therefore I Am; The Global Afterlives of Hugo Grotius’s Propertied Subject.” In the book, I examine how colonial difference structures his writings and what this can tell us about the impact of Dutch imperialist thought. Grotius’s writings were deeply influential for Dutch colonial activities in Asia, including Taiwan

Previously, I was awarded a three-year Marie Skłodowska Curie Global Fellowship from the European Commission (2019-2022) to work on my project Maritime Imagination: A Cultural Oceanography of Dutch Imperialism and its Aftermaths. In this project, I turn to the ocean to better understand Dutch contributions to global capitalist, racial, colonial and imperialist ideologies.

The project developed out of growing concerns expressed by social justice movements in The Netherlands around the impact that 400 years of Dutch imperialism has had on contemporary global power relations.

In Maritime Imagination I look at narrations of the maritime, maritime supremacy, and the Dutch at sea within the Dutch cultural archive impact on colonial, racial-sexual, capitalist, legal and environmental co-formations. Developing a cultural oceanography, I explore how looking from the perspective of the ocean might provide a different framework for studying Dutch imperialism and its aftermaths.