How does the “stuff” of a city’s past – architecture, archives, artifacts, and more – shape how we live and who we are today? Around the globe, how is this urban heritage identified and preserved, revived and reinterpreted, used and abused in the present, and to what ends? What drives communities to remember, display, and memorialize their histories, particularly when those memories still cause pain and spark controversy?

These are the key questions that guide my ongoing research into the origins and impacts of urban heritage preservation initiatives in Indonesian cities. Using both ethnographic methods and a careful attention to the changing materiality of the city, my work reveals how such initiatives to protect traces of Dutch rule in the archipelago now prompt both a renewed grappling with legacies of the colonial past and an evolving debate over the future of these cities and the welfare of the diverse communities who call them home. 

In addition to this work, I publish and present on a variety of subjects related to the socio-political dimensions of cultural heritage and cities, including international cultural diplomacy, postcolonial architectural movements, gentrification, culture and the arts as a source of civic engagement, urban water management, and memory politics in the Netherlands. In the context of the current pandemic, I am also developing a new project that will examine how young Indonesians are using social media platforms to build innovative forms of heritage activism, challenge the status quo of urban politics, and advocate for more inclusive cities. 

I am currently preparing the manuscript for my book, Colonial Pasts, Future Cities: Urban Heritage Advocacy in Post-Authoritarian Indonesia. Based on my fieldwork carried out in the Indonesian cities of Jakarta, Semarang, and Bandung since 2012, the book examines how and why the tangible traces of the colonial period – crumbling buildings, aging infrastructures, discarded objects – have recently begun to attract curiosity and concern from Indonesian government officials, community organizations, and local activists, who now advocate vigorously for these material vestiges of foreign rule to be treasured as “heritage.” My study of the people and places caught up in this surprising phenomenon reveals that the rapid “heritagization” of Indonesia’s colonial past is being driven not only by commitments to memorialize a city’s history, but also by desires to bring order to its present. With an ironic echo of the discourses once deployed by colonial authorities, the cause of heritage protection functions in Indonesia today as justification for urban elites to sanitize, discipline, and gentrify large swaths of the cityscape, to the detriment of already-marginalized communities. Nevertheless, grassroots actors are also experimenting with activism in and around heritage sites as a tool to re-order their relationship with government authorities. Set against the backdrop of Indonesia’s ongoing transition from dictatorship to democracy, contention over the fate of historic neighborhoods does have the potential, I argue, to carve out space for greater citizen engagement in wider debates over the past and future of their cities. “Heritage” is thus simultaneously a mechanism for controlling urban space and a creative social movement, exemplifying the tensions and aspirations of postcolonial urban life in Southeast Asia’s largest nation.

Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society Grant (2017)

Stanford Institute for Research in the Social Sciences Dissertation Fellowship (2017)

Stanford Diversity Dissertation Research Opportunity Grant (2016)

Stanford Graduate Research Opportunities Grant (2016)

Fulbright U.S. Student Research Grant, Indonesia (2014)

Fulbright Critical Language Enhancement Award (2014)

Stanford Abassi Program in Islamic Studies Student Grant (2013)

Stanford Center for Ethics in Society Grant (2013)

Stanford Archaeology Center Travel Grant (2013)

Emmanuel College Research Grant, University of Cambridge (2010)

Harvard University Committee on Human Rights Studies Grant (2008)

Harvard Fund for Historical Research on Questions of Justice Grant (2008)