Michael Laffan, Princeton University

Professor Princeton, New Jersey mlaffan@princeton.edu Office: (609) 258-8820

Expert In

Colonial Indonesia Dutch colonialism History of Southeast Asia Islam and Indonesian nationalist movement Islam in Indonesia Nationalism in Southeast Asia Orientalism

Bio/Research

I study the history of Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean, focusing at present on Islam, nationalism, Dutch colonialism and orientalism. I earned my B.A. in Asian Studies (Arabic) at the Australian National University in Canberra (1995) and got my Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from the University of Sydney (2001). I came to Princeton in 2005 from a postdoctoral fellowship at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, the Netherlands. In my first book, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (2003), I argued that Islam played a central and largely unacknowledged role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, which historians have tended to associate mainly with a secular, Dutch-educated elite.

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