Matthew Woolgar

Reseach Topic:

The Party System in Indonesia in the 1950s in West Java and South Sumatra

Supervisor:

Kevin Fogg

Profile:

My DPhil research focuses on the Indonesian party system in the 1950s and how its development interacted with rapid social changes and processes of decolonisation. In doing so, it focuses on the case studies of West Java and South Sumatra and draws on a combination of archival sources, published sources and oral history.

This research is funded by sources administered by organisations including the University of Oxford, St Cross College, St Antony's College and the Menzies Centre of King's College London. It also involves collaboration with a number of institutions: I have spent time as an Affiliate Fellow at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) and my counterpart institution in Indonesia is the Political Studies Centre of the Indonesian Institute of Science (LIPI).

I am also interested in modern Indonesian literature, and am currently co-editing a collection of contemporary short stories translated from Indonesian and co-translating (with Dr Kevin Fogg) a collection of the short stories of A A Navis.

I received an MA in Southeast Asian Studies from SOAS, University of London, and a BA in History from the University of Oxford, and studied for a year at Yogyakarta State University on the Darmasiwa scholarship programme.