Rosa de Jong is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, who specializes in 19th- and 20th-century Caribbean history. She participates in the COLUMN project, which addresses the colonial heritage of universities and botanical gardens in Europe and beyond. As part of the Botanical Gardens cluster, she is researching the colonial entanglements of the Utrecht Botanical Garden with a focus on its Surinamese history.
She received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam for the dissertation, Escaping on Iberian Ships Arriving in Caribbean Camps: Second World War Refugees in Global Transit in 2025. Her research has been widely featured in the Dutch media, including radio, magazines, and newspapers.
Recently, she initiated a project to digitize one of the most important archives for her dissertation research, the Neve Shalom Archive in Paramaribo. Together with the Jewish community, she scanned over 100,000 documents dating from the 17th century to the present day. For this undertaking, she received the Societal Impact Prize from the Amsterdam Young Academy. Since her BA, archives as sites of knowledge production have been a key interest of hers and in 2023 she co-founded the research network Archives of Power/The Power of Archives. More recently she became an anchor member of the Tulane Jewish Caribbean Working Group.
In 2022, Rosa de Jong was the Alexander Grass Memorial Fellow at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. The NWO PhDs in the Humanities program funded her dissertation research, and the KITLV, NIOD, Horizonfonds, and EAJS, among others, supported her travel to archives and conferences.
She previously worked as a junior researcher at the KITLV (Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies), studying the colonial history of the city of Rotterdam. She earned BAs in History and Philosophy and an RMA in History at the University of Amsterdam.