PROFESSIONAL BACKGROUND
Rosa de Jong received her research master’s degree in history (2018) and bachelor’s degrees in history and philosophy (2016) from the University of Amsterdam (the Netherlands). She is currently a PhD candidate at the history department at the University of Amsterdam and a guest researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden and at Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies (NIOD) in Amsterdam. Rosa de Jong was the final editor for Holland Historisch Tijdschrift and served on the humanities PhD council and the central PhD council at her university. She also previously worked at the KITLV as a junior researcher for a project on the colonial and enslavement past of the city of Rotterdam, which resulted in a number of public events and three books.
Ms. de Jong has has visited several archives in the Caribbean, the USA, and Europe over the past four years, including the Neve Shalom Archive in Suriname and the Mongui Madoru Library in Curaçao. She has interviewed many people who endured the flight to the Caribbean, as well as some of their descendants, and she incorporates into her work photos and documents from their private archives. She draws upon a broad variety of sources that testify to the small-scale experiences of individuals such as personal letters and diaries, as well as sources with a broader policy-view such as governmental documents. She uses sources in Dutch, German, French, English, and Spanish.
FELLOWSHIP RESEARCH
Rosa de Jong was awarded an Alexander Grass Memorial Fellowship for her research project, “From European Ports to Caribbean Homes: Second World War Refugees in Global Transit.” This project, which has also been funded through the NWO, investigates the refugees who fled during the Second World War from the Dutch Low Countries via different European ports to the Caribbean, ending up mainly in Jamaica, Suriname, Curaçao and Cuba. She is interested in the dynamics between the Jewish refugees’ agency, the colonial administration, the European governments, and the complex societies in which they arrived. She presupposes that the intersections and intertwining of class, race, gender, religion, age, and nationality are pivotal for understanding the many interactions and relationships that occurred along these flight migrations and, therefore, intersectionality is the overarching theoretical concept that frames her project.
This fellowship allows Ms. de Jong to focus predominantly on survivors' oral histories and personal papers held in the Museum's archival collections, where so many of them “speak” for themselves through recorded interviews, diaries, and memoirs. The Museum's vast collection of oral histories in particular contain interviews with survivors and personal accounts that add a generational depth of understanding to provide insight into the great variety of experiences of flight to the Caribbean region.