Colonial and Global History: Heritage and Postcolonial Studies

The Heritage and Postcolonial Studies specialisation of the Master's Programme in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University has a regional focus on colonial and postcolonial Indonesia, in transnational and comparative perspectives. You will critically study the politics and practices of archives in the context of colonial and postcolonial history, thereby engaging with debates and queries regarding their decolonization.

This new specialisation:

• broadens to the field of Critical Heritage Studies, and towards the study of archival politics and practices, beyond (and including) those of the official national and regional archives;
• will be structurally informed by postcolonial critical debates, and seek strategies to open up archives for understanding alternative voices and uses than those that had been principle of collecting;
• has a broad focus on the political dynamics of heritage formation in colonial and postcolonial Asian contexts (in particular of nineteenth and twentieth-century Indonesia).