The Crafoord Foundation has granted SEK 1 600 000 for a PhD project entitled "Gender, Diplomacy and Imperialism: How non-male actors and transgender practices shaped the colonial world of maritime Southeast Asia." The project will be an integrated part of the research environment Historical Treaties of Southeast Asia and the PhD student will be supervised by Stefan Amirell and Birgit Tremml-Werner.
The PhD position will be announced in an open international call in the autumn of 2023 and the project is expected to start in January 2024.
Summary of the project
This research project in global diplomatic history investigates the largely overlooked role of female and nonbinary (i.e. neither male or female) actors in diplomatic negotiations and imperial expansion in maritime Southeast Asia from around 1750 to 1941. The project also explores the diplomatic significance of transgender practices, by which an individual who normally identified with a particular gender temporarily could take on the role and appearance associated with another gender.
Empirically, the project aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how gender influenced the processes of diplomacy and imperialism in Southeast Asia. Theoretically, the project aims to contribute to a more sophisticated understanding of the significance of gender in diplomatic and imperial contexts from global, non-Eurocentric and cross-cultural perspectives.
