Dr. Gerrit Knaap

Biography

Gerrit Knaap studied history at Utrecht University, specializing in social economic history and historical demography. In 1985, he obtained his Ph.D. with a thesis on the VOC's (the United Dutch East India Company) population in Amboina during the seventeenth century. Throughout the 1980s, he actively edited source publications and worked as a freelancer at the Royal Institute for the Tropics in Amsterdam. By the end of the decade, he became a post-doctoral researcher on a project focused on VOC harbourmaster's specifications at the Free University of Amsterdam. In 1990, he joined the Section of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia at Leiden University, where he taught a course on the economy of modern Indonesia. Knaap later became head of the department of Documentation History Indonesia and was a curator of Special Collections at the KITLV in Leiden. He initiated projects to digitalize catalogues and increase public awareness through exhibitions and publications, such as the Woodbury & Page project, which highlighted the works of photographers in nineteenth-century Indonesia. He also contributed to establishing a digital interview archive on Indonesian migrants. After a sabbatical in 1998, Knaap worked on further research related to VOC's harbourmasters' specifications. In 2006, he became a programme leader at the Netherlands Institute of History and contributed to projects on the Dutch Caribbean and religious policies in the Netherlands Indies. In 2013, he was nominated as a part-time endowed professor of Overseas Colonial History at Utrecht University, retiring in 2020 but continuing his activities at the university as an emeritus professor.

Research Interests