Willem van Schendel

Willem van Schendel obtained a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the University of Amsterdam (1980, cum laude). He taught at the Department of History and Art Studies, Erasmus University Rotterdam, from 1990 as Professor of Comparative History. At present he holds the chair in Modern Asian History at the University of Amsterdam and is in charge of the Master Programme in Contemporary Asian Studies, in which the University of Amsterdam collaborates with the University of Leiden and the Free University Amsterdam. He is also in charge of the Asia Department of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. His dissertation research focused on changing social and economic relations in rural Bangladesh, and resulted in Peasant Mobility: The Odds of Life in Rural Bangladesh. Like much of his subsequent work, it was based on a combination of archival research and fieldwork. The transformation of rural societies in South and Southeast Asia continues to be a research focus. In recent years, he has developed an interest in the history of ethnicity, the comparative study of borderlands, and illegal transnational flows of people and goods.

Among Willem van Schendel’s most recent books are The Bengal Borderland: Beyond State and Nation in South Asia (London, 2005); Illicit Flows and Criminal Things: States, Borders and the Other Side of Globalization (Bloomington; ed. with I. Abraham, 2006); Identity Politics in Central Asia and the Muslim World: Nationalism, Ethnicity and Labour in the Twentieth Century (London and New York; ed. with E.J. Zürcher, 2001); Time Matters: Global and Local Time in Asian Societies (Amsterdam; ed. with H. Schulte Nordholt, 2001); The Chittagong Hill Tracts: Living in a Borderland (Bangkok, 2000). In recent years his articles have appeared in The Journal of Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Development and Planning D: Society and Space, and The International Review of Social History, and as chapters in various edited volumes.

Currently, Willem van Schendel is chair of the South-South Research Programme on the History of Development (SEPHIS) and he serves on several international committees.

http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/h.w.vanschendel/