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Histories Connected
Histories Connected seeks to explore social, cultural, and political issues that connect people of Asia, the Middle-East, Africa, the Americas, and Europe throughout different periods of time.
This seminar brings together scholars at Leiden University and other universities who are interested in writing histories grounded in empirical research and theory, irrespective of historiographical approach, geographical focus, or time period. It provides an informal forum to discuss written work-in-progress and other texts of common interest. In addition to monthly meetings, it also organizes an annual lecture and book launches to introduce innovative, thought-provoking works of historical inquiry to a wider public.
Contact
Noelle Richardson: historiesconnectedleiden[@]gmail.com
Previous Histories Connected events
Spring 2026
27 February 2026 – Pouwel van Schooten
“A Web of Obligations. Post-Slavery Life in Galle Fort”
27 March 2026 – Sanayi Marcelline
“Respectability as Strategy. Dutch and Burgher Self-Fashioning in Inter-Imperial (Ceylon) Sri Lanka”
10 April 2026 – Limin Teh
Book launch and Roundtable
Chinese Miners in Japanese Manchuria, 1905-1945
with Görkem Akgöz (IISG), Catia Antunes (LUIH), Maghiel van Crevel (LIAS), Stefano Bellucci (LUIH)
24 April 2026 – Mingran Cao
“War of Everyone Against Everyone: Company Power and State Building in Coastal Jiangsu, 1938-1946”
29 May 2026 - Alicia Schrikker
“Fragments of a decentered 19th century history of Banjarmasin, South Kalimantan”
Fall 2025
25 September 2025 – Tsolin Nalbantian
Draft grant proposal
30 October 2025 – Ethan Mark
“Half the Battle: Remembering the Netherlands as an Empire in the Second World War.”
28 November 2025 – Aditya Kakati
“Worlds of War: Violent Imperial Legacies of Global and Total Wars in Zo Social Memory on the India-Burma (Myanmar) borderlands”
Spring 2025
31 January 2025 – Harriet Zurndorfer
“Human Trafficking, Beautiful Women, the Land of the Cockaigne, and Burmese Bells”
21 March 2025 – Noelle Richardson
“Expansion of Sugar Plantations in Early Modern Java, c. 1740-1780”
25 April 2025 – Pouwel van Schooten
“At the Council of Justice: Manumission in early-modern Galle (1692-1792)”
23 May 2025 – Sanjukta Poddar
“Dilemmas of the Kalwars: Caught between Critique and Conformism of Caste”
Fall 2024
27 September 2024 – Aditya K. Kakati
“Worlds of War: violent legacies and memories in the Burma-India frontiers”
25 October 2024 – Nira Wickramasinghe
“From Hermann to Haramanis: Cinnamon and Botanical Knowledge”
29 November 2024 – Sander van der Horst
“Dovetailed Protest: Indonesian activists and the global communist peace movement, 1949-1965”
Spring 2024
23 February 2024 – Sarah A. Cramsey
Care, Children and the Other Holocaust
22 March 2024 – Gijs Dreijer
“Rethinking the Scramble for Africa: Dutch Entrepreneurs in West Central Africa (1850s-1910s)”
26 April 2024 – Tsolin Nalbantian
TBA
22 May 2024 – Craig Wilder (MIT)
“‘Knickerbocker Renaissance: Dutch Schools and Slavery in the Early United States’”
23 May 2024 – Craig Wilder (MIT)
Masterclass: The Lores of Flatbush: Dutch Storytelling in Colonial North America
23 May 2024
Roundtable on Slavery: From Scholarly Debates to Public Reckoning
Craig Wilder (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
M’hamed Oualdi (Sciences Po Paris)
Wouter Veraart (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam)
Nira Wickramasinghe (Leiden University)
Fall 2023
29 September 2023 – Aditya Kakati
“Making ‘no-man’s lands’: infrastructural, connectivity and closure across China-Burma-India during global war”
27 October 2023 – Zhengfeng Wang
“Techno-power in the Food Supply Chain”
24 November 2023 – Sanjukta Poddar
“Learning Together, Living Separately: Sectarian Values and Segregation in University Hostels in Colonial India”
Spring 2023
24 March 2023 – Ali Al-Tuma
“Leaving the Master and into the Desert. Slave Escapes in the Spanish Sahara: Colonial Attitudes and Slave Agencies”
31 March 2023 – Aditya Kiran Kakati
“On ‘Forgotten’ Wars: unpacking Eurocentric and racial asymmetries in memories of a global war in the Indo-Burma frontier”
28 April 2023 – Carolien Stolte
“Fellow Travelers: Global Decolonization and Gandhian Peace Work”
26 May 2023 – Nira Wickramasinghe
“Genealogies of Abolition: connected histories of Slavery and its ‘Amelioration’”