Selection of 2027 Special Issue

The Journal for the History of Knowledge is pleased to announce the selection of the 2027 Special Issue, "The Making of Colonial Knowledge and its Afterlives in Dutch Universities", with guest editors Larissa Schulte Nordholt and Ligia Giay.

Articles will be released online in 2027, with paper copies available from early 2028. Have a peek at the Special Issue abstract: 

"This special issue examines how Dutch universities participated in the making of colonial knowledge and how these histories shape their colonial afterlives. As happened elsewhere, different universities in the Netherlands recently commissioned inquiries into their colonial pasts. Bringing together studies from Dutch universities, this issue places diverse themes and approaches in conversation and situates them within a growing international body of scholarship on academic entanglements with colonialism. 

From the onset of Dutch colonial activity in the seventeenth century, universities were involved in the production and circulation of colonial knowledge. The production of colonial knowledge penetrated disciplines spanning from theology, law, to the natural sciences. The Dutch colonial apparatus transformed places into sites which generated and circulated colonial knowledge; ideas, objects, and people from the colonies flowed into Dutch universities. In contrast, institutions of higher learning for colonised populations appeared only around the turn of the twentieth century. 

These histories provide a useful starting point to trace the colonial afterlives of universities today, both in the Netherlands and in former colonies. After the formal end of Dutch occupation, what imprints of colonialism continue to shape institutions of higher learning in the Netherlands and its former colonies? By engaging with scholarship from other regions and foregrounding the production of colonial knowledge, this issue highlights how Dutch universities' entanglements with colonialism have contributed to broader histories of knowledge that continue to inform research, teaching, and institutional identities today, in both national and global contexts."