Y (Yuanita) Wahyu Pratiwi MA
PromovendusI hold a bachelor's degree from the Department of History at Universitas Gadjah Mada and a master's degree from the Cosmopolis Advanced program at the Institute for History, Universiteit Leiden. Through the Cosmopolis program, I specialized in global history with an emphasis on 17th- and 18th-century Dutch sources. My research focuses on the socio-economic, food, and environmental history of Java and Southeast Asia during the early modern and colonial periods.
In my master's thesis, I investigated the resilience of Java's rice economy amidst the pressures exerted by the Dutch East India Company in the latter half of the 18th century. Building on this foundation, my Ph.D. project will explore the well-being of rice-farming communities during this peak of prosperity in the 18th century, and their subsequent transformation under the consolidating influence of the colonial state in the 19th century. This research challenges established measures of living standards by incorporating social, cultural and environmental variables such as food quality, artistic expression, and disaster mitigation, while shifting the focus from individual to community well-being.