Online Forum: Contextualizing Mindanao: Archives and Digitization for the Study of a Global Past

13 November 2026, 15:00 PHT (08:00 CET), online via Zoom

We are pleased to announce this online forum, hosted by the UP Asian Center at the University of the Philippines Diliman and co-organised by project member Ariel Lopez. Two further members of the Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia project, Birgit Tremml-Werner (Stockholm University) and Eleonora Poggio (Linnaeus University), are among the speakers.

Why has so little been written about Mindanao’s history before the twentieth century? This online forum looks at the reasons. For a long time, Mindanao’s past has mostly been written by outsiders. Its documents are scattered across archives far from the island, which is part of the legacy of colonial bureaucracy. Historians from outside rarely have the languages and cultural knowledge needed to read the past in traditions, stories and objects. Researchers based in Mindanao, for their part, face physical, economic and technical barriers to reaching their own archives. Drawing on the linguistic and archival turns, the speakers will discuss how future generations of historians can write local pasts into global narratives. They will introduce different kinds of archival sources and ways to access and share them.

Speakers

• Birgit Tremml-Werner (Stockholm University)
• Eleonora Poggio (Linnaeus University)
• Ayshia Fernando Kunting (Western Mindanao State University)
• Tirmizy Abdullah (Mindanao State University, Marawi)
• Midori Kawashima (Sophia University, Tokyo): Locally-preserved Manuscripts: Importance and Challenges

The forum is free and open to the public. You need a free Zoom account to join.
Read more and register on the UP Asian Center website