Contact
Email:
Mikko.Toivanen@eui.eu
Further Information
Mikko Toivanen will be joining the Munich Centre for Global History as a postdoctoral research fellow for the year 2021. His visit is funded by a personal grant from the Osk. Huttunen Foundation.
Mikko has a background in global and colonial history, with a specific focus on nineteenth-century Southeast Asia as a trans-imperial space. He defended his PhD, on colonial travel and leisure in Java, Ceylon and the Straits Settlements, at the European University Institute in October 2019. Colonial travel in a global cultural context is also the topic of his monograph The Travels of Pieter Albert Bik: Writings from the Dutch Colonial World of the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden University Press, 2017).
At the LMU, Mikko will be working on his postdoctoral project Staging a Colonial Capital: The Construction of Public Space in Singapore and Batavia through Spectacle and Ceremony, 1845-1870. The project examines
the development of urban culture and ceremonial uses of public space in Southeast Asia through a range of case studies from the middle of the nineteenth century, while also seeking to address contemporary debates about imperial legacies in postcolonial cityscapes.