WM pattern Blauw

2024 Research Fellows

Every year the Research Center for Material Culture invites a number of research fellows based in the Netherlands and abroad to stay and work with us for a determinate time. We are interested in what their work can offer the practices in our museum and want to provide a space for them to do research in conversation with us and especially in relation to our collection. 

As the RCMC, our aim is to facilitate research for others, while at the same time creating spaces of engagement and connections among people sharing similar interests. We invite you to browse our current research fellows' profiles and follow along during their time with us as we often organize public programming where further engagement with these fellows' research is discussed.

Nuraini Juliastuti

During her fellowship at the Research Center for Material Culture, Nuraini will be exploring ideas around the exhibition of Indonesian objects in the museum, including to re-arranging and re-telling the objects. It includes the contribution to the development of the new collections policy within the museum.

To align with the interdisciplinary character of the museum's Research Center for Material Culture, Nuraini will produce a research article based on her concept of 'Museum of Agriculture for Multiple Beings'. The Museum of Agriculture for Multiple Beings (MAMB) is imagined as a temporary museum to establish non-extractive attitude as the community research methodology and knowledge production. Throughout the duration of fellowship, the organisation of the MAMB will be tested and tried out in the formats of conversation series, reading sessions, writing annotations, reproductions and storytelling events.

Amie Soudien

Thinking with the RCMC research theme ‘care/disrepair’, Amie Soudien will extend upon her PhD research concerning narratives of enslaved women situated in Cape Town to develop a ‘network’ of stories across the VOC empire in regions such as present-day Indonesia, Suriname and Brazil. She will work with the archival resources housed in the Wereldculturen collection, explore how these resources can be activated beyond the museum, and how they might contribute to the remembrance of slavery. An outcome of this research fellowship will be a ‘zine’ or publication, in which Soudien will experiment with artistic and proto-curatorial strategies that engage with representational care, harm and risk.

Petrina Dacres

Dr. Petrina Dacres is Head of the Art History Department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica. Her work and research focus on Caribbean art; African diaspora art; public sculpture and memorials; and memory studies. She is an independent curator and founding member of Tide Rising Art Projects, an organization created to support and promote contemporary Caribbean art and film. Dr. Dacres has organized exhibitions at the International Studios and Curatorial Programmes where she was the 2022 Jane Farver Curatorial Resident, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New York; The National Museum, Jamaica, Kingston; and National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, among others. She is the recent recipient of the Caribbean Cultural Institute Fellowship at the Perez Art Museum, Miami.

Christine Chivallon

The research conducted by Christine Chivallon focuses on materiality, space and identity, mainly in the Caribbean societies and through Caribbean migration in Europe, including research on the memory of slavery and cultural trauma. She also works on theories of cultures, production of knowledge and postcolonial and decolonial controversies. In 2000, she was awarded the Bronze Medal from the CNRS for her body of scientific work. She has been elected as Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, University of Oxford since 2013.  

If you wish to keep up to date with our fellows and their activities please contact the RCMC directly.