Work with us

At GLOBALISE, we highly value collaborations with scholars, citizen scientists, artists, and anyone interested in VOC materials. This page provides an overview of current individual collaborations and opportunities to work with us, for example, as a guest researcher or intern. For collaborations with specific projects, please refer to our collaborations page. Feel free to reach out through our contact form to discuss collaboration possibilities.

Guest researchers

Visiting scholars pursuing new research with the GLOBALISE materials and VOC archives

Ann Heylen
Ann is a professor at National Taiwan Normal University (NTNU) in Taipei, where she specializes in Taiwan studies and directs the International Taiwan Studies Center. She is familiarizing herself with the GLOBALISE materials and Digital Humanities methods to further her research into the history of the VOC on Taiwan.

Asawari Luthra
Asawari is an anthropologist whose research focuses on how to ‘decolonize’ access to digitized colonial archives. Her work engages with the ethical and practical challenges of making archival collections with colonial origins accessible in a responsible way.

Leolita Masnun
Leolita is an anthropologist who has joined us to investigate the long-term impact of VOC-era slavery on kinship and gender in Eastern Indonesia. Drawing on her extensive ethnographic fieldwork in the Moluccas, she is now delving into the VOC archives. Her research aims to bridge archival data with ethnographic insights to understand how the shadows of the past continue to shape the present.

Specialist Contributors

Experts strengthening GLOBALISE’s data

Nikhil Bellarykar 
Nikhil is an independent researcher, specialising in Dutch sources on Maratha History. He is familiar with early modern Dutch language and paleography. He has authored multiple papers, attended academic conferences and received a scholarship to work on this theme. He is working towards multiple diverse projects at the moment.

Yedda Ljeljeng lja Palemek 
Yedda comes from an indigenous Paiwan community in southern Taiwan. She holds a Research MA in early modern history from Leiden University and is finishing MA in linguists at National Taiwan University. Yedda is the Head Procurement Services at World Vegetable Center and a long-time collaborator with Council of Indigenous Peoples, where she contributes to the Council’s indigenous language and Austronesian collaboration projects. Outside of work, Yedda enjoys documentaries, hiking, and dancing.

Roni Tabroni 
Roni completed his doctoral program in History at Padjadjaran University and presently works as a Junior Researcher at the Research Center for Treasures of Religion and Civilization National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Indonesia. He researches Indonesian Islamic history and has authored books and articles on subjects such as Salafism, the history of the Sultanate of Banten and Islam in the Cirebon residency. 

Johny A. Khusyairi 
Johny is a historian, currently working as an associate professor at Universitas Airlangga, Surabaya. His research interests include the history of religion, urban symbolism, local and global culture, and music studies. His publications have dealt with the themes of old and new cities in Indonesia, Javanese Christianity, East Javanese culture, and spiritualism in local communities in Surabaya. He is currently researching the Madurese-Hindu community in East Java.

Yeh Chunting
Chunting is a graduate student at National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan. He has been trained by Prof. Hsin-hui Chiu to read the VOC archive related to Taiwan and is currently working on his MA thesis under her guidance. Chunting’s research focuses on writing a global microhistory of overseas Chinese. This study is based on petitions drafted by the Chinese who were exiled by the VOC in the eighteenth century. He has previously worked as a full-time certified teacher in history at junior high school for three years (2019-2021).

Madison MacKenzie
Madison received her BA in Comparative Literature from UC Irvine in California, and moved to The Netherlands for her MA in Literary Studies from the University of Amsterdam. She has taught in Leiden University’s International Studies program, and served as an elementary teacher in Tokyo, Japan.

Work with us

We invite students, scholars, and citizen scientists to collaborate with us in unlocking the VOC archives. Whether you’re interested in working with our existing materials or enhancing them by curating datasets and developing training materials for our Named Entity Recognition (NER) models, we welcome partnerships at various stages of the project.

Also, we frequently host datasprints, where we work collaboratively with scholars and citizen scientists to expand or refine datasets pivotal to the accessibility of VOC sources. These sessions offer a platform to exchange insights and acquaint oneself with emerging digital methodologies. Stay informed about upcoming datasprints through our Events page and newsletter.

We aim to enable users of the GLOBALISE research infrastructure to add their own annotations to the material. However, this is currently not yet possible. More information will follow.

Internships

Are you interested in an internship that connects the past with the digital future? At GLOBALISE, we welcome university students at both the Bachelor’s and Master’s levels who are passionate about early modern history and/or the digital humanities. Join us as an intern to create contextual data on themes relating to the Dutch East India Company archives.

Interns have the opportunity to work on enriching our datasets, such as by identifying individuals mentioned in the archives, reconstructing settlement structures, or developing our thesaurus for terms like commodities and status groups. We also welcome interns who are interested in contributing to outreach or who have digital skills relevant to data work. If you’d like to learn more about our internships or are unsure if this role is for you, don’t hesitate to contact us.

User panel

We regularly consult our user panel for feedback on our plans for the GLOBALISE research infrastructure. The user panel meets in varying compositions. The following people have participated in sessions: