Yvette Kopijn

Yvette Kopijn (Aruba, 1966) is an oral historian by profession. For the most part, she seeks to collect the life stories of elderly migrants and their offspring. Trained in Gender Studies and Social Sciences, Kopijn joined the the Belle van Zuylen Institute (Universitv of Amsterdam) in 1996. There she worked on her Phd. project that looks at gender, color/class and sexuality in the life stories of three generations of Javanese-Surinamese women in the Netherlands. From 2001 until 2006, Kopijn worked as an oral historian at Imagine Identity and Culture, Het Indisch Huis and the International archive for the women’s movement (IIAV, now Aletta). At Aletta, she was the project leader of ‘Haar Geschiedenis’ (‘Her Story’) (www.haargeschiedenis.nl): an online collection of life stories of migrant women, for which she collected the life stories of Eurasian women. In 2007 and 2008, Kopijn worked on her book ‘Stille Passanten’ (‘Silent travelers’) (KIT 2008), for which she and her co-author Hariëtte Mingoen collected the life stories of the eldest Javanese-Surinamese migrants. In 2009, she joined the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research to finalize her dissertation.