Marleen Reichgelt is postdoc at the Institute for History.

More information about Marleen Reichgelt

I am a cultural historian specialising in colonial photography and the agency of children in colonial contexts. As postdoctoral researcher in Fenneke Sysling’s Vidi project Epistemic Actors: The Role of Indonesians in the Making of Knowledge in the Colonial Era, I study the local informants and assistants who supported natural science research in colonial Indonesia. We aim to make visible the often-anonymous men, women, and children who were indispensable to European researchers and to reconstruct their stories from scientific archives.

My interest in local actors builds on my PhD, Revisioning Colonial Childhoods: A Photographic History of Papuan Children in Missionary Networks, 1890–1930 (Radboud University Nijmegen, 2023), which demonstrates how historically relevant insights into the lives of young Papuans can be won by recontextualising a large collection of photographs.
Alongside my research, I lecture at Radboud University and work as collection specialist at the Heritage Centre for Dutch Monastic Life.

Fields of interest

• Colonial photography;
• The agency of children and young people in colonial history;
• The religious dimensions of colonial governance and post-colonial humanitarian initiatives;
• Current debates within the Dutch heritage sector on how to improve access to and descriptions of colonial photo collections.

Key publications

Marleen Reichgelt and Felicity Jensz, ‘Belonging in/to Empire: Papuan children, Catholic Missionaries, and the Formation of Transimperial Networks in Late-Nineteenth-Century Europe’, Journal of World History 36:1 (2025), 85-119. https:⁠/⁠/dx.doi.org/10.1353/jwh.2025.a950281

‘School Subjects: Photography as Source on Children’s Lives in Colonial Boarding Schools’, History of Education 53:1 (2024), 189-211. https:⁠/⁠/doi.org/10.1080/0046760X.2023.2223512

‘Zooming In: Children as Guides and Informants in Merauke, West Papua, 1905-1910’, Culture Unbound 15 (2023). https:⁠/⁠/doi.org/10.3384/cu.vi0

‘Children as Protagonists in Colonial History: Watching Missionary Photography’, BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 135:3-4 (2020), 80-105. doi: 10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10869