Pichayapat Naisupap is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History.

More information about Pichayapat Naisupap

Fields of interest

• Cultural History
• Dutch Empire
• Dutch East India Company
• Eurasian History
• Southeast Asian History
• Nonhuman History  

Research

His research is about the elephant and the Dutch East India Company (VOC). The research explores various existing Asian elephant traditions that used the elephant to emblematize royalty and sacrality and how the Dutch via their overseas empire came to engage and interact with these traditions through elephant knowledge, management, trade, and gift-giving alongside their own elephant tradition passed down from antiquity. This research aims to uncover a continuum of elephant traditions from one end of Eurasia, Europe, to the other end, Southeast Asia, which will bring to light the uncharted but connected histories between the Dutch and Asia regarding their traditions of the emblematic elephant.

Curriculum vitae

Pichayapat Naisupap graduated with BA in Southeast Asian Studies at Thammasat University in Thailand with an interest in cultural history. He became more specialized in history when he studied for a master’s degree at Chulalongkorn University. His first MA thesis explores a social and cultural history of Thailand during the modern period by looking at contemporary ghost stories. In 2019, he was granted a scholarship to join the Cosmopolis Advanced program at Leiden University. He conducted the second MA thesis examining the elephant and its emblematic role, especially in Eurasian diplomacy, in the seventeenth-century Dutch Empire. In 2021, he continues with PhD by researching how the Dutch via their overseas empire engaged and interacted with Asian elephant traditions that associated the elephant with royalty and sacrality.

Publications