Prof. Dr. Peter Keppy
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Biography
Peter Keppy (1965) is researcher at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Amsterdam. He holds an endowed professorship at Radboud University, Nijmegen on the history of popular culture and mass violence in Southeast Asia.
Among his main publications are The Politics of Redress. War damage compensation and restitution in Indonesia and the Philippines (KITLV/Brill, 2010). For his Tales of Southeast Asia’s Jazz Age. Filipinos, Indonesian and Popular Culture, 1920-1936 (Singapore. NUS Press, 2019) Keppy received an honorable mention from the Society for Ethnomusicology in 2020.
In collaboration with Roel Frakking (Utrecht University), he produced a Special Issue for the journal War & Society (October 2024) on the socio-political trajectories of ex-combatants returning to society in post-colonial Africa and Southeast Asia.
DOI special issue: https://doi.org/10.1080/07292473.2024.2375880
With colleague Abdul Wahid of Gadjah Mada University, Jogja, Indonesia, he is writing a history of the rise of state-backed civilian militias in Central Java in the 1950s. This history sheds light on the organised nature of state violence and the use of civilians in it.
With a small group of international scholars from different disciplines, Keppy is currently investigating from social, historical and cultural perspectives how groups in Southeast Asia deal differently with suffering and trauma experiences in the aftermath of war and mass political violence.