Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences
Netherlands
fellow
Niels Mathijssen
2022-2023
Home institution
De Groene Amsterdammer
Country of origin (home institution)
Netherlands
Discipline(s)
Colonial and postcolonial history
Information and communication sciences
Theme(s)
Peace & conflict
Post-colonialism
Fellowship dates
›
Biography
Niels is a Journalist-in-residence Fellow at NIAS during 2022-2023.
Niels Mathijssen is historian and freelance journalist writing mostly about colonialism, Dutch history of slavery, the war in Indonesia and colonial looted art. He writes for weekly magazine De Groene Amsterdammer since 2018. Before that, he regularly published for daily newspaper Trouw and online news platform De Correspondent. Het was guest curator at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision and associated researcher at NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. As co-founder and editor of the award-winning history blog Over de Muur and board member of Jonge Historici, Mathijssen worked towards strengthening the position of historians in public debate. He was allowed to follow the creation of the Rijksmuseum’s slavery exhibition exclusively for one year and a half. Mathijssen wrote about the making of this project in De Groene Amsterdammer, and discussed it in De Groene Podcast.
Research Project
Allemans eenling. De biografie van Poncke Princen (1925-2002)
Deserting, defecting and taking up arms against former fellow soldiers, only Poncke Princen dared doing that during the war in Indonesia (1945-1950). This made him one of the most controversial people in the Netherlands after the Second World War. Princen received a lot of media attention during his lifetime, but remarkably, no in-depth research has been done into his desertion and defection. For a long time, the priority of historians and journalists was the issue of war crimes committed by Dutch soldiers during the war in Indonesia. Now there is finally clarity on this issue, there is room to explore other angels and topics about this conflict. In this biography, I reconstruct Princen’s desertion and defection, and analyse the assessment of these acts in both the Netherlands and Indonesia, in the past and present. At NIAS, I will set up my research project.
Research Interests:
Military desertion and defection; Dutch-Indonesian decolonization; War memory and transnational identity