Prof. dr. Esther Captain is endowed professor of Intergenerational Impact of Colonialism and Slavery at Utrecht University. She is also working as a historian and senior researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV) in Leiden. Her work focuses on the intergenerational transmission of slavery, postcolonial and post-WW II memories. She is currently a member of the committee conducting research into the Dutch Royal House and its colonial history, initiated by King Willem Alexander. She is also coordinator of the international knowledge cooperation program on slavery history and its effects in Suriname, South Africa and Indonesia. Previously, she led a project on the role of the Dutch state in colonial slavery, which resulted in the book Slavery and the Dutch State. Dutch Colonial Slavery and its Afterlives (2025), and was project leader in the research program ‘Independence, Decolonization, Violence and War in Indonesia, 1945-1950’, which resulted in Resonance of Violence. Bersiap and the Dynamics of Violence in the First Phase of the Indonesian Revolution, 1945-1946 (2025).