Student Spotlight: Benjamin Moseley

Benjamin Moseley is a PhD Candidate in History. His research focuses on Eastern Indonesia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Read Ben’s story below:

I am primarily interested in cultural developments in Island Southeast Asia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, an era in which there were tremendous political and religious changes. More specifically, my focus is on the establishment of Christianity in certain parts of the Eastern Indonesia, namely Ambon, Flores, and their surrounding areas during this historical period and trying to make sense of how the people living in those areas understood and adapted this new faith.

My relationship with Eastern Indonesia goes back almost a decade now. In Fall 2012, I arrived on the island of Seram in Indonesia’s Maluku Province as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant. I remained there for a full academic year, during which I often visited Ambon, the political and cultural center of the province. I also practiced speaking Indonesian and learned a fair amount of Ambonese Malay, which is still spoken by many across the province. 

From 2014 to 2016, I attended the University of Washington for a master’s degree in Southeast Asian Studies. I wanted to focus on Maluku, so I wrote my master’s thesis on the recent history of interfaith relations in the province. Maluku is one of Indonesia’s more religiously diverse provinces, with Christians and Muslims each representing roughly half of the province’s population. While at the University of Washington, my professors encouraged me to apply for a doctoral program in history and suggested that the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa would be a great fit for me.

Since 2016, I have had the pleasure of studying at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa under the supervision of Prof. Leonard Andaya. Arriving in Mānoa, I knew I wanted to go further back in history than I had done for my master’s thesis. Originally, I was planning to look into Ambon’s nineteenth century history, which would have required a foundation in Dutch. However, because Dutch was not offered (few universities offer Dutch language courses), I signed up for Portuguese. As a result, I began to look into the Portuguese language documents from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Portuguese were more active in Maluku. The Portuguese connection also drew much of my attention to Flores and Timor. I have since studied Dutch in the Netherlands, in part supported by scholarships from the History Department and the Graduate Student Organization. 

What helped guide me to my dissertation topic, “The Localization of Christianity in Early Modern Eastern Indonesia” was that the University of Hawai’i had so many available resources. Our library contains a great amount of books on Southeast Asian history, especially on Eastern Indonesian history. Moreover, because Prof. Andaya’s own scholarship was on Island Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period, I am always able to draw from his vast expertise. Very few universities have these sorts of resources.

In Fall 2019, I started a personal blog. I wanted to share some semi-formal writings on academic topics that I personally find interesting, like allegations of witchcraft in seventeenth century Indonesia or mythological origin stories in the region. I also wanted to share a lot of online resources which I have collected over the past few years. When I first started graduate school, I was largely unaware of just how much universities, research centers, libraries, and archives had moved their sources online. Nowadays, it is possible to conduct a great deal of research from anywhere – so long as you have a strong internet connection. Incredibly, this list of online resources keeps expanding.

Last semester, I was given the opportunity to teach my own 300-level class: History of Southeast Asia until 1800. Teaching the class was a joy and most students showed a great deal of interest in the subject. Over the course of the semester, we covered important events and periods in the history of particular Southeast Asian countries prior to the nineteenth century as well as explored broader regional themes, such as food history, labor history, and family history in the region. I was even able to include my own research into the classes on Eastern Indonesian history. As of Spring 2022, I am primarily focused on continuing to research and writing my dissertation.

Outside of academia, I pursue a number of hobbies. I play guitar. I enjoy cooking and making drinks. I love board games. In what may be a little connected to my academic interests, I now collect pieces of batik and ikat from around Indonesia. I have some friends in Indonesia who work in the batik industry and they really opened my eyes to much broader world of batik beyond the traditional motifs that you would find in, say, the kratons (palaces) of Yogyakarta, Solo, or Cirebon. During my time in Flores in 2020, I also learned a lot about ikat-production from some of the families who made them and I now have collected some pieces of that textile as well. A few years ago, I never would have imagined I would become so interested in textiles. Ben Moseley is originally from New Orleans but is currently based in Honolulu, O’ahu.

A few notes on those photos: I conducted some research in 2020 in Flores. I arrived on the island of Flores, where there is a strong Catholic community, to conduct some research on their history and their religious relics. These relics include statues of Mary (Bunda Maria) and Jesus as well as lamps, candleholders, and the like and they are believed to have been brought to the area in the seventeenth century. They take these relics out around Easter time. Unfortunately, it was while I was in Larantuka in eastern Flores that Covid-19 lockdowns began to occur. Aside from Easter celebrations being cancelled, the Indonesian Ministry of Research and Technology requested that foreign researchers cease their research. Before this all occurred, I took some photos of the relics in Konga, a town near Larantuka. Additionally, when travel restrictions within Indonesia were loosened, I prepared to return to the United States. Before I left Flores in August, I stopped in Kelimutu to see the multi-colored volcanic lakes.