Dr. Dries Lyna

Biography

Dries Lyna is a socio-economic historian specializing in the 17th and 18th centuries, particularly focusing on VOC settlements in the Indian Ocean World. He completed his PhD at the Centre for Urban History at the University of Antwerp and has been a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at Duke University and the Getty Research Institute. Lyna has served as a guest lecturer at the Free University of Brussels and the Institut d'Études Supérieures des Arts in Paris. His current research interests include the socio-institutional histories of colonial cities, with a particular emphasis on 18th-century Sri Lanka and South Africa. He is leading a project titled 'Displaced Forgetting', which examines the family histories of individuals formerly enslaved under Dutch and British rule in Sri Lanka and South Africa, in collaboration with Nira Wickramasinghe from Leiden University. Moreover, he coordinates an international project funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation called 'Economies Trust', which explores the social networks of the urban poor in the 18th-century Cape Colony, working alongside Eva Marie Lehner from the University of Bonn and Wouter Ryckbosch from Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Ghent University. Dr. Lyna also coordinates the Ba-program 'Comparative European History' and is a member of the General Board of the N.W. Posthumus Research School of Economic and Social History. He supervises several PhD students researching various aspects of social mobility and land ownership among enslaved and manumitted individuals during the colonial period.

Research Interests

Experience