Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Panggah Ardiyansyah
2025-2026
Home institution
University of Sheffield
Country of origin (home institution)
United Kingdom
Discipline(s)
Anthropology and ethnology
Archeology and prehistory
Colonial and postcolonial history
Religious sciences
Theme(s)
Cultural Studies
Inequalities, inclusion & Social Innovation
Post-colonialism
Religion
Fellowship dates
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Biography
Panggah is a NIAS-NIOD-KITLV Fellow during 2025-2026.
Panggah is a Research Associate at the Digital Humanities Institute (DHI), focusing on the intersections of colonial and imperial history, digital collections and archives, and digital mediation of history and culture. Trained as an art historian, his interest lies broadly in the production of knowledge related to historical and/or religious materials both on-site and in museum. This preoccupation with knowledge production has been directed towards probing new methodologies to decolonising the field of art history and archaeology, in particular for Southeast Asian art.
His interest in colonial collecting histories has also brought him to actively meditating on issues related to object restitution. He is a core project member for Getty-funded Circumambulating Objects: on Paradigms of Restitution of Southeast Asian Art (CO-OP), in which he supervised an internship project on the digitisation and (digital) repatriation of Yogyakarta manuscripts at the British Library. Previously, he consulted for Leverhume-funded Beyond Restitution: Exploring the Story of Cultural Object After Their Repatriation by the British Institute of International and Comparative Law (BIICL).
Research Project
Evocative Fragments: Archaeological Knowledge Production for Sendang Duwur and Its Dispersed Objects
Panggah Ardiyansyah wants to understand why an Islamic site has been marginalised (or not) within Indonesian archaeology, despite the fact that the majority of the population in Indonesia is Muslim.
The research aims to deconstruct the knowledge production of Sendang Duwur, a 16th-century Islamic complex in East Java, Indonesia. In doing so Panggah Ardiyansyah wants to contribute to the developing scholarship on heritage politics in relation to identity formation, inclusion/exclusion and frameworks of restitution.
The project activities are divided into three parts: tracing the relationships between historical figures involved in the circulation of Sendang Duwur manuscripts, reconstructing the interventions of the Archaeological Service of the Dutch East Indies at Sendang Duwur in the first half of the 20th century, and outlining the entangled movements of manuscripts and artefacts associated with the site.
Research Interests:
Heritage politics and marginalization; colonial archaeology; Islamic heritage in Indonesia; manuscript circulation; postcolonial knowledge production; Southeast Asian art