Alicia Schrikker is interested in society-state interaction in colonial contexts in Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. She supervises BA, MA and Phd research in the fields of socio-legal history, history of disasters and colonial mentality. Her regions of expertise are Sri Lanka, Indonesia and to some extent, South Africa and India.

More information about Alicia Schrikker

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 is  lecturer (UD) in Colonial and Global history at Leiden University. She is involved in the faculties’ interdisciplinary honours program and coordinates the Colonial and Global History program at the Institute for History.

Over the past years she 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) about the political and cultural representation of natural disaster in island Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. She is currently counterpart in a multidisciplinary project on climate, natural hazards and social change, funded by the Australian Research Council.

From September 2017 onwards she will be leading the NWO funded research program ‘Colonialism Inside Out: everyday experience and plural practice in Dutch Institutions on Sri Lanka, 1700 – 1800’. This project combines life-writing with a socio-legal approach to the history of colonialism and is executed in collaboration with Radboud University Nijmegen.

In 2018 she will start with 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 has been 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 (BMGN).