Alicia Schrikker is Professor History of The Netherlands in the world and Director of Research at the Leiden University Institute for History.

More information about Alicia Schrikker

Alicia Schrikker is Professor of the History of the Netherlands in the World and Director of Research at the Leiden University Institute for History. She is interested in society–state interaction in colonial contexts in Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. She supervises BA, MA and PhD research in the fields of socio‑legal history, the history of disasters, and colonial mentality. Her regions of expertise are Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and to some extent South Africa and India.

Curriculum Vitae

Alicia Schrikker (1976) participated in the multilateral TANAP project and obtained her PhD cum laude in 2006 with a study of Dutch and British colonial policy in Sri Lanka between 1780 and 1815.

From 2006 to 2011 she worked as project coordinator and lecturer at Leiden University for the multilateral Dutch–Asian education and research project ENCOMPASS. Since 2012 she has been University Lecturer in Colonial and Global History at Leiden University. She is involved in the Faculty’s interdisciplinary Honours Programme.

Over the years she has further developed her interest in colonial interaction in Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with a particular focus on sites of negotiation and colonial engagement, such as judicial courtrooms, colonial workplaces, and post‑disaster sites.

She was co‑applicant for the NWO/AHRC‑funded interdisciplinary research network ‘The Cultural Politics of Catastrophe’ (2012–2014), which examined the political and cultural representation of natural disasters in island Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. She is currently a counterpart in a multidisciplinary project on climate, natural hazards and social change, funded by the Australian Research Council.

From September 2017 onwards, she led the NWO-funded research programme ‘Colonialism Inside Out: Everyday Experience and Plural Practice in Dutch Institutions on Sri Lanka, 1700–1800’. This project combined life-writing with a socio‑legal approach to the history of colonialism and was carried out in collaboration with Radboud University Nijmegen.

In 2018 she started her VIDI project (NWO) ‘Institutional Memory in the Making of Colonial Culture: History, Experience and Ideas in Dutch Colonialism in Asia, 1700–1870’. This project is, in essence, a critical analysis of colonial mentality within colonial officialdom in Asia.

From 2006 to 2016 she served as managing editor and editor‑in‑chief of the journal Itinerario. She is expert reviewer on colonial history for Geschiedenis Magazine; editor of the book series Dutch Sources on South Asia (Manohar Press, New Delhi); and editor of the fully open‑access journal BMGN / Low Countries Historical Review. 

Publications

Activities