Suze Zijlstra is assistant professor in public history of slavery. She is specialised in Dutch colonial and maritime history, with a special interest in the role of women in this past, and in her work explores in the ways in which present society deals with the colonial past and the history of slavery. In addition to her position at the UvA, she is research curator at the Dutch National Maritime Museum in Amsterdam, Het Scheepvaartmuseum.

In 2021, Zijlstra published her book De voormoeders. Een verborgen Nederlands-Indische familiegeschiedenis, in which she investigated the Asian and Eurasian women in her own family from the time of the Dutch East India Company. Earlier, she obtained her PhD with a dissertation on power relations in seventeenth-century Suriname (2015).

For Het Scheepvaartmuseum, Zijlstra was one of the curators who worked on the exhibition ‘Shadows on the Atlantic’ (opened in 2024), and previously she curated an exhibition on slavery in the Indonesian Archipelago for the Tong Tong Fair 2023.

Currently, Zijlstra teaches in the Public History MA, she is internship coordinator of the history programme, and vice chair of the history MA Programme Committee. Students who are interested in colonial history, maritime history, gender history, family history, and the way we presently deal with colonial history and the history of slavery, are welcome to get in touch to discuss possibilities for MA thesis supervision or tutorials.