Winner of IBP 2017 Dissertations Humanities

Lisa Hellman, 'Navigating the Foreign Quarters: Everyday Life of the Swedish East India Company Employees in Canton and Macao 1730–1830'.
Lisa Hellman's 'Navigating the Foreign Quarters' draws on a rich array of private sources in a micro-study of a hither-to neglected European enterprise. Using class, gender, and ethnicity as analytical categories, she demonstrates how local histories may inform the global through a study of the processes of every day practices in the East India trade. Hellman is the deserved winner of the IBP 2017 Dissertations Humanities prize.

Shortlist IBP 2017 Dissertations Humanities

Nadine Chan, 'A Cinema Under the Palms: The Unruly Lives of Colonial Educational Films in British Malaya'.
Nadine Chan's 'A Cinema Under the Palms' discusses the production, distribution, and reception of colonial educational films as texts of multiple meanings in the period from the early 1920s until Malaysian independence in 1957. She demonstrates that while intended to serve as tools of colonial governance, films were unruly objects, often received in unintended ways.

Bart Luttikhuis, 'Negotiating Modernity: Europeanness in Late Colonial Indonesia, 1910-1942'. 
Bart Luttikhuis 'Negotiating Modernity' argues that the existing historiography dealing with differentiating practices in colonial Indonesia has tended to overstate the importance of racial delineations. He examines how various diverse groups, including the indigenous ranks of the colonial system, identified as ‘European’ through the construction of a discursive link between ‘Europeanness’ and ‘modernity’.

Reading Committee Accolades IBP 2017 Dissertations Humanities

Ground-Breaking Subject Matter Accolade
Alexander Supartono, whose 'Re-Imag(In)Ing History: Photography and the Sugar Industry in Colonial Java' analyses how photographic practices informed the ways that the colony was imagined while problematising the ideological premises of ‘colonial’ photography.

Most Accessible and Captivating Work for the Non-Specialist Reader Accolade
Lik Hang Tsui, whose 'Writing Letters in Song China (960-1279): A Study of its Political, Social, and Cultural Uses' provides a clear and interesting account of Song letter writing that demonstrates how interpersonal relationships were conducted by written exchanges.

Specialist Dissertation Accolade
Cecilia Dal Zovo, whose 'Archaeology of a Sacred Mountain: Mounds, Water, Mobility, and Cosmologies of Ikh Bogd Uul, Eastern Altai Mountains, Mongolia' combines a narrative reconstruction of indigenous cosmologies with spatial, statistical, and archaeo-astronomical analyses of prehistoric funerary mounds.