Notes on Contributors

In: Storied Island
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Notes on Contributors

Bernard Arps

is Professor of Indonesian and Javanese Language and Culture at Leiden University, where he teaches theory of area studies, cultural politics in Southeast Asia, literatures of South and Southeast Asia, and Javanese language in/as culture. He has published, among others, Tall Tree, Nest of the Wind: A Study in Performance Philology (NUS Press, 2016).

Els Bogaerts

lectured at Leiden University and coordinated the research programme “Indonesia across Orders; The reorganization of Indonesian society, 1930–1960” at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation, and other academic programmes. She has published about decolonization and culture, the effects of cultural encounters, and televised performing arts, and has (co-)edited several volumes. Her publications include “The panther’s fang; In search of Indonesian television archives” (2019) and “To fast or not to fast? Pangulu Ki Amad Kategan challenges his sultan in the Sĕrat Nitik Sultan Agung” (2021). An independent scholar, she explores proximity and the local.

Tony Day

is an independent researcher living in Graz, Austria. He has taught at the University of Sydney, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, Wesleyan University and Yale-NUS College, and held fellowships at the National Humanities Center (USA), Humanities Research Centre, ANU (Australia), ISEAS-Yusof-Ishak Institute (Singapore) and the Israel Institute for Advanced Studies. His publications include Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia (University of Hawai’i Press, 2002) and “The poetry of minor characters and everyday life in the Sĕrat Cĕnthini” (Wacana: Journal of the Humanities of Indonesia, Vol. 22 No. 33, 2021).

Nancy K. Florida

is Professor Emerita of Javanese and Indonesian Studies at the University of Michigan. She is a historian of colonial and postcolonial Indonesia whose work concerns Javanese and Indonesian history, historiography, literary studies, and the articulation of Islam in Indonesia. Her publications include Writing the Past, Inscribing the Future: History as Prophecy in Colonial Java, three volumes on the Javanese manuscripts in the palace libraries of Surakarta (Javanese Literature in Surakarta Manuscripts, Vol. 1–3), and a number of articles, most of which work with Javanese manuscripts to suggest novel understandings of the Indonesian past. She is currently working on two books, one on the metaphysical poetry of an early 19th-century Sufi sage and the other (with Tony Day) on the Cĕnthini.

Verena Meyer

is a Postdoctoral Fellow at MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society. Before joining MF, she received her PhD in Islamic Studies and was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Columbia University’s Department of Religion. In her work, she draws on ethnographic field research, training in contemporary critical theory, and literary studies to investigate questions of Islamic identity, the role of memory and the formation of heritage, and the transmission of knowledge across time and space. Her work has been supported by the Mellon Foundation and the Global Religion Research Initiative, and her articles have appeared in journals including Indonesia and the Malay World, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land en Volkenkunde, and the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies. She is currently working on her first book.

Willem van der Molen

(1952) holds a degree in Javanese language and literature from Leiden University. He worked at this university and, until his retirement, at the Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde in Leiden. As a guest professor and researcher, he has been affiliated with Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, Osaka University, and the Israel Institute of Advanced Studies in Jerusalem. In 2010 he was appointed adjunct-professor of Philology and Old Javanese at Universitas Indonesia. Besides scholarly articles he wrote a book on Javanese script (1993) and a history of Javanese literature (2015).

Ronit Ricci

is Professor of Asian Studies and Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is also affiliated with the School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. She has published widely on Javanese and Malay manuscript cultures, the Sri Lanka Malays, translation and exile in colonial Asia. She is currently leading the ERC-funded project “Textual Microcosms: A New Approach in Translation Studies,” focused on interlinear translations from the Indonesian-Malay world.

M.C. Ricklefs

(1943–2019) was a leading historian of Indonesia and of Java. He held positions at SOAS, Monash University, University of Melbourne, the Australian National University and the National University of Singapore. Among his seminal works are A History of Modern Indonesia, ca. 1300 to the present (first published in 1993 and updated regularly), Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi, 1749–1792: A History of the Division of Java (1974), and a trilogy on the Islamisation of Java: Mystic Synthesis in Java: A History of Islamisation from the Fourteenth to the Early Nineteenth Centuries (2006), Polarising Javanese Society: Islamic and Other Visions (c. 1830–1930) (2007), and Islamisation and Its Opponents in Java: A Political, Social, Cultural and Religious History, (c 1930 to the Present) (2012).

Yumi Sugahara

is Professor at Osaka University. She graduated from Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 2002. She works on Islamic history in Indonesia. She received the Japan Society for Southeast Asian Studies Award in 2014 for her book, The Javanese Religious Movement under Dutch Colonial Rule: Islamization in 19th Century Manuscripts (in Japanese, 2013). Recently, she edited A Comparative Study of Southeast Asian Kitabs: Paradise and Hell (2021). She is currently leading the JSPS (Japan Society for the Promotion of Science) Grant-in-Aid project “Research on the Early Islamization of Southeast Asia: Religion, Kingship, and Cosmology.”

Edwin P. Wieringa

is Professor of Indonesian Philology with Special Reference to Islamic Cultures at the University of Cologne, Germany. Trained in Indonesian philology at Leiden University, where he was awarded a PhD with highest honours in 1994 on a corpus of traditional Javanese historiographical texts, he has published widely in the fields of traditional and modern Indonesian literatures.

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