Thalia Ostendorf

Dr. Thalia Ostendorf is a lecturer in Caribbean literature at the University of Amsterdam. She holds a BA and MA in Comparative Literary Studies from Utrecht University, and attained her doctorate from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. In her last postdoc project Plantation Kinships (University of Amsterdam), she researched the nature of kin relations between people of the African diaspora in Suriname and the Netherlands whose ancestors were all enslaved at the same plantation. She did so through the analysis of a corpus of Dutch-language Surinamese literature, specifically by Edgar Cairo (1948-2000), and fieldwork in Suriname. Currently she is working on a biography of Surinamese author Bea Vianen (1935-2019). She also writes articles and short stories, and is one of the co-founders of feminist publishing house Chaos.