Research and publications

The Austronesian section has expertise in heritage and identity discourses, and is actively involved in research on manuscripts, considered both for what they reveal about local writing practices, and for the knowledge they preserve and transmit.

 Publications by faculty members can be accessed here:

• Prof. Dr. Jan van der Putten:

  https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/soa/personen/putten.html

• Prof. Dr. Elsa Clavé:

  https://www.aai.uni-hamburg.de/en/soa/personen/clave.html

Ongoing projects

• DREAMSEA (2017-2025)

  Since 2017, Professor van der Putten has been heading the program "Digital Repositery of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia" at the Center for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), in collaboration with the PPIM Jakarta. He was joined in 2022 by Prof. Clavé. This program aims to safeguard the diversity of written cultures in Southeast Asia and open up access to their digital copies.
  https://dreamsea.co/

• Assembling Fragments of Modernity in End-of-the-Century Malay World (2023–2025)

  Tiara Ulfah (PhD candidate)
  https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/research/working-groups/fnt/fnt10.html

Projects completed

• Affirming Rights Over Land and Resources: Originals and Authoritative Documents in the Legal Culture of the Malay Peninsula (c. 1780-c. 1910) (2021-2024)

  Elsa Clavé
  https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/research/cluster-projects/completed-cluster-projects/rfc08.html

• The Changing Praxis of the 19th-century Malay Manuscript Economy (2015–2019)

  Jan van der Putten and Siti Nurliyana Binta Taha
  https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/sfb-950/phase-2/project-area-a.html#14627575

• On the edge of a tradition: paratexts in 19th-century Malay manuscripts (2014– 2019)

  Jan van der Putten and Siti Nurliyana Binta Taha
  https://www.csmc.uni-hamburg.de/sfb-950/phase-1/project-area-a.html#14626993