Amber Zijlma studied Ancient, Medieval and Modern History at Durham University. For her undergraduate degree, she wrote her thesis on the ‘performativity’ of protest and power in the ‘Women’s War’ of 1929 in Nigeria under British colonial rule. She did her Masters in Global and Imperial History at the University of Oxford, where her thesis focused on Chinese indentured labourers in Dutch colonial Sumatra and British colonial Transvaal in the 19th and 20th centuries. The research described the paradoxical and unstable relationship between political and economic powers within colonial regimes, through the (active) presence of bonded Chinese laborers.
At the Huygens Institute, Amber works at the Combatting Bias project. This project aims to produce practical guidelines for identifying, analysing, describing, and reducing bias in dataset creation within the humanities and social sciences. Previously, Amber worked at the HUB Global Labour Conflicts at the IISH; was an intern in the Behind the Star project at the NIOD; and did a “micro-internship” at the EuroClio Contested Histories project.
