Kate McGregor
Professor Kate McGregor is a historian of Indonesia in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include Indonesian historiography, memories of violence, the Indonesian military, Islam and identity in Indonesia and historical international links between Indonesia and the world. She teaches in the areas of Southeast Asian history, the history of violence and Asian thematic history.
In February 2018 Kate completed a four year Australian Research Council Future Fellowship on the project: Confronting Historical Injustice in Indonesia: Memory and Transnational Human Rights Activism. A major outcome of this research is a new 2023 book on activism and the Indonesia ‘comfort women’ of the Japanese army called Systemic Silencing: Activism, Memory and Sexual Violence in Indonesia (Wisconsin University Press). Her recent publications include the co-edited volumes Gender, Violence and Power in Indonesia: Across Time and Space (co-edited with Ana Dragojlovic and Hannah Loney, Routledge, 2020).
Kate co-founded the Historical Justice and Memory Network and was part of the organising committee for the network's first international conference in Melbourne 2012. The network under the name Dialogues on Historical Justice and Memory is now being run by Columbia University. She has many collaborations with Indonesian scholars including the forthcoming edited volume Rethinking Colonial History.
Kate is a lead Chief Investigator on the Research Project. k.mcgregor@unimelb.edu.au
Ana Dragojlovic
Associate Professor Ana Dragojlovic is a lecturer in Gender Studies in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. She is working at the intersection of feminist, queer, postcolonial and affect theory with a primary focus on violence, memory, and trauma; and gender and mobility; She is the author of Beyond Bali: Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy (Amsterdam University Press, 2016) and co-author of Bodies and Suffering: Emotions and Relations of Care (Routledge, 2017, with Alex Broom).
Ana received her PhD in anthropology in 2008 from The Australian National University. Her doctoral research resulted in a monograph entitled Beyond Bali: Subaltern Citizens and Post-Colonial Intimacy (2016), which constitutes the first extensive discussion about Balinese diasporic formations. Situated within the fields of post-colonial, critical race and gender studies, the book explores under what social, political and historical circumstances Balinese subaltern citizens claim proximity and mutuality between themselves and to their former colonisers, rather than striving to reveal and commemorate colonial violence, as other subaltern citizens with Indonesian heritage in Dutch post-colonial society do. This ethnography is firmly based in an analytical orientation towards relations and processes in which knowledge is produced through anticipated connectivities but also through the disjunctures and surprising linkages and associations people make.
During her post-doctoral research at The University of Queensland, and the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden, the Netherlands she explored the correlation between memory, materiality, affectivity and subjectivity in the context of Indisch diaspora. Ana is currently working on a project that focuses on therapy cultures, particularly as they related to historical violence with interests in affect, embodiment and subjectivity.
Ana is a lead Chief Investigator on the Research Project. ana.dragojlovic@unimelb.edu.au
Grace Tjandra Leksana
Since 2007, Dr Grace Leksana has been working on the issue of state violence in Indonesia, particularly the anti-leftist violence in 1965. After obtaining her doctoral degree from Leiden University with a dissertation on memory culture of the anti-communist violence, Grace became highly interested in plantation society and informal politics that was shaped by colonialism. This drives her to develop a new project on the history of citizenship under the changing socio-political contexts in plantation areas in East Java. Her area of interest lies in the field of memory studies, oral history, state violence, agrarian and village studies, and informal politics. Grace is currently a lecturer at the Department of History, Universitas Negeri Malang, East Java.
In the Submerged Histories project, Grace will work as a collaborator and research assistant, focusing on library research, media surveys, and fieldwork preparations in Indonesia.
grace.leksana.fis@um.ac.id
Julia Doornbos
Julia Doornbos is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences and lecturer at University College Groningen, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Her doctoral thesis focuses on the everyday geographies of Indo-Europeans across the Netherlands and intergenerational transmissions of colonial family histories. Her current research interests include diaspora and (forced) migration, identities, senses of belonging, everyday (family) life and in- and exclusion.
In the Submerged Histories project, Julia worked as a research assistant in 2021 collecting and analysing media content from The Netherlands.
j.r.doornbos@rug.nl
Astrid Kerchman
Astrid is currently a lecturer at the Utrecht University.
Astrid Kerchman works as a research assistant and junior teacher at the Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP). As a research assistant, she is involved in the Erasmus+ funded project "REGENERART: Rethinking Gender Equality Through Art". She is the project coordinator of MOED Museum of Equality and Difference and is also part of the management team of the IOS Gender and Diversity Hub.
Astrid commenced work as a research assistant In the Submerged Histories project from 2022. She will be focusing on library research, media surveys, and fieldwork preparations in the Netherlands.