The Expatriate Experience:
Past and Present
To celebrate its fifth anniversary as an independent organisation in 2013, the EAC organised a symposium The Expatriate Experience: Past and Present. The symposium examined expatriate migration history from a variety of historical angles.
Symposium The Expatriate Experience: Past and Present
The symposium highlighted the importance of documenting the social history of expatriate life and the research possibilities offered by the unique collection of the EAC. The full-day program featured speakers, presentations, and workshops. The speakers represented a variety of backgrounds and disciplines, including anthropology, history, and area and ethnic studies.
We are grateful to the Leiden University Institute for History and Centre for Modern Urban Studies (Campus The Hague), the Center for Historical Culture – Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Hague Municipal Archives, Adlib Information Systems and Joske Geselschap at Sandberg Event Management for their generous support and input for this symposium.
Speakers
Corien Glaudemans is Senior Researcher at the Municipal Archive of The Hague and an external advisor of the Expatriate Archive Centre. She studied history at Leiden University and defended her dissertation there in 2003.
Read more about Corien Glaudemans
She presented an introductory lecture on the history of the EAC and its current collections, as well as a paper about expatriates in the sources of the Municipal Archive of The Hague.
Max de Bruijn is the author of the novel Expats and several non-fiction and scientific books on colonial history. He studied History at Utrecht University and later worked as a curator at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam.
Read more about Max de Bruijn
As a representative of the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, he lived for several years in Jakarta and managed heritage conservation projects in Malaysia and Indonesia. At the time of the symposium, he was working as an analyst at the Ministry of Security and Justice in The Hague.
Wim Willems is director of the Centre for Modern Urban Studies at Campus The Hague – Leiden University. He has written a number of books on immigrants and ethnic minorities and has edited several volumes on Dutch people from the former East Indies and colonial history.
Read more about Wim Willems
He has also written widely on the history of travelling groups, especially Gypsies and caravan-dwellers. At the time of the symposium, he was working on research projects in urban studies and historical migration studies and writing a series on the history of The Hague for AD/Haagsche Courant.
Marijke Huisman is a post-doctoral researcher at the Center for Historical Culture at Erasmus University Rotterdam. She studied History and Women’s Studies at Utrecht University and later worked as an independent researcher, journalist and editor.
Read more about Marijke Huisman
She became a PhD student at Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2003. Her main research interests include autobiography and life writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, book history, women’s writing and publishing, and the history of feminism and the women’s movement.
Inge Brinkman is attached to the African Studies Centre at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Leiden University. Since 2008, she has researched the historical relationships between literacy, orality, elite formation and the introduction of mobile phones in Northern Angola.
Read more about Inge Brinkman
She also coordinated a case study on returnees, development and new ICT in south-east Angola as part of the wider programme Mobile Africa Revisited. Her earlier research included work on mobile telephony in Sudan and a history of SNV, a Dutch development organisation.
Keetie Sluyterman is professor of business history at Utrecht University and a specialist in Dutch business history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has written or co-authored numerous business histories, including studies of Océ, Proost en Brandt, CSM, Ernst & Young, Rabobank, Hagemeyer, Royal Dutch Shell and Boskalis.
Read more about Keetie Sluyterman
At the time of the symposium, she was writing a history of the Dutch brewer Heineken together with Bram Bouwens. She was also past-president of the European Business History Association and a member of the advisory editorial boards of Business History and Business History Review.
Freek Colombijn graduated in Cultural Anthropology, with honours, and History at Leiden University. He received his doctorate in Social Sciences from Leiden University in 1994, with a thesis on the urban development of the Indonesian city of Padang.
Read more about Freek Colombijn
His publications include Under Construction: The Politics of Urban Space and Housing During the Decolonization of Indonesia, 1930–1960. He has also co-edited volumes on urban ethnic encounters, violence in Indonesia and the modernisation of Indonesian cities.
Leo Lucassen is the Academic Director of the Institute for History at Leiden University. He studied Social and Economic History at Leiden University and received a PhD, cum laude, for his dissertation on the history of Gypsies in the Netherlands between 1850 and 1940.
Read more about Leo Lucassen
He held positions at the universities of Nijmegen, Leiden and Amsterdam and was a fellow of both the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study. At the time of the symposium, he shared the chair of Social History with Prof. Wim Willems and was a full-time professor of Social History at Leiden University.
Aniek X. Smit is a PhD student with the Institute for History at Leiden University, focusing on the settlement process of highly skilled migrants in The Hague and Jakarta since 1945.
Read more about Aniek X. Smit
She presented a paper on the settlement patterns of Dutch expatriates in Jakarta since the 1970s.
Anne-Meike Fechter is Senior Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of Sussex. She has studied corporate expatriates as migrants, resulting in the book Transnational Lives: Expatriates in Indonesia (2007).
Read more about Anne-Meike Fechter
Her work also focuses on aid workers as mobile professionals. She is co-editor of Inside the Everyday Lives of Development Workers: The Futures and Challenges of Aidland (2011).
Sridevi Menon is an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University. Her research interests include the racial politics and welfare capitalism of company towns, ethnographic approaches to memory and history, and transnational forms of historical remembering.
Read more about Sridevi Menon
At the time of the symposium, she was working on an ethnographic study of Indians who worked for the British Malayan Petroleum Company, later Brunei Shell, in Seria, Brunei, between the 1940s and 1960s.
Rick de Jong is a historian associated with the Centre for the History of Migrants, an academic network of researchers on migration history. At the time of the symposium, he assisted Leo Lucassen with the Global Migration History Programme.
Read more about Rick de Jong
He gave a presentation on the Polish judge Rostworowski, who lived and worked in The Hague in the 1930s.
Barbara Henkes is a lecturer in Modern History at the University of Groningen. Her research examines processes of inclusion and exclusion in relation to national communities.
Read more about Barbara Henkes
At the time of the symposium, her research focused particularly on transnational family histories in the Netherlands and South Africa.
Rosita Arnts-Boer is the Archivist of the Expatriate Archive Centre. She played an important role in the development of the EAC collection and led the introduction of a new registration system.
Read more about Rosita Arnts-Boer
As a former expatriate herself, she is well aware of the importance of preserving expatriate life stories.
Mara Sfountouri, a student at Erasmus University Rotterdam, is writing her Master's thesis on National Identity and Nostalgia in the Expatriates’ Letters 1979–2009.