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Yorim Spoelder was Joint Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Studies and the German Historical Institute London for 2023-24.
Yorim Spoelder is a postdoctoral research fellow at Freie Universität Berlin. Following studies in Maastricht, Taipei, Freiburg, Cape Town and New Delhi, he completed his PhD at Freie Universität Berlin (2020). Spoelder’s research focuses on the modern connected histories of Europe, South and Southeast Asia and his main interests include imperial history, the history of knowledge, urban history, critical heritage studies and international affairs. His forthcoming book Visions of Greater India: Transimperial Knowledge and Anti-Colonial Nationalism, c. 1800-1960 will appear with Cambridge University Press (2023). The book brings together three stories usually told apart, namely the archaeological recovery of a ‘lost’ Buddhist past along the Silk Roads, the linked projects of colonial archaeology in Dutch and French Southeast Asia, and the intellectual history of anti-colonial nationalism and internationalism in interwar British India. His second book project zooms in on the changing predicament of Eurasian communities and, more generally, investigates the transformation of colonial urban culture and dynamics of interracial sociality in British and Dutch South and Southeast Asia throughout the nineteenth and first of half of the twentieth century. Spoelder previously held various fellowships at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg, Freie Universität Berlin and IHEID Geneva, was a guest scholar at EHESS Paris, and affiliated as a researcher with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi.
As a research fellow at IAS, Spoelder conducted research for his second book project Mestizo Worlds, which zooms in on the identity politics and socio-cultural history of Eurasian communities in the Dutch East Indies, British India, Ceylon and the Straits Settlements. Drawing on a wide range of textual and visual sources, the project foregrounds transimperial connections and comparisons. Caught between empire and nation, Indos, Anglo-Indians, Burghers, and Singapore’s Eurasians often acted as ‘cultural brokers’ and pursued very similar identity projects throughout the interwar period and the era of decolonization. Whereas the ‘Eurasian Question’ has been primarily studied through the lens of colonial governmentality, Mestizo Worlds explores processes of transculturation and political mobilization by zooming in on the lived experiences of Eurasians in the colonial metropolis, paying attention to community organizations, the home, gender, class, education, residential patterns, work, leisure and sartorial practices. Moving beyond narratives of exceptionalism reinforced by the compartmentalized study of European empires in Asia, the project highlights the role of Eurasians as transimperial actors, key drivers of regional integration and harbingers of a wide range of social and cultural processes associated with the advent of ‘colonial modernity’ in South and Southeast Asia.
