Bart Barendregt is an associate professor at the Leiden Institute of Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology. Bart has an interest in popular and digital culture, and has published on Southeast Asian performance, new and mobile media, and (Islamic) pop music.
Bart is currently working on a book dealing with Islamist boy band music and the mixing of religion, youth culture and politics among Malaysian and Indonesian student activists. He is editor of Sonic Modernities in the Malay World (Brill, 2014), and co-editor of Green Consumption: The Global Rise of Eco-Chic (Bloomsbury, 2013) and the volume Recollecting Resonance (Brill, 2013). The latter book was recently translated into Indonesian and published as Merenungkan Gema: Perjumpaan Musikal Indonesia-Belanda (2016) by KITLV-Jakarta and Yayasan Obor.
Research
As a senior researcher and main coordinator Bart was until recently affiliated to the Articulation of Modernity Project. This four-year project, funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), focuses on societal change through the prism of popular music. It emphasizes the appeal of modernity rather than that of the nation-state, thus offering a new way of studying Southeast Asia that foregrounds the movement of people, music, ideas, and technologies among the region’s cosmopolitan centres.
Bart is currently engaged in the ARC Discovery project Revitalising the Musical Arts of Indonesia’s Lampung Province (with Margaret Kartomi, Monash University, Melbourne and Rina Martiara, ISI Yogyakarta). This ethnographic project aims to document how and to what extent one indigenous group in the post-Suharto era of regional autonomy in Indonesia is improving its status through affirmative political action based on its traditional musical arts, philosophy and Islamic beliefs.
Bart is presently also working on Resonating Pasts (with Wayne Modest and Anette Hofman). This project investigates the potential of the sound archive, and its possible role in rewriting colonial histories. In a strategic move to grant acoustic collections the status of resonating (museum) objects and potential sources of history, the project explores how focusing on sound archives in (ethnographic) museums can push beyond the over-determined place that the visual so far has generally held in museum exhibits.
Together with Dr. Ariel Heryanto (Australian National University) Bart is editor of Southeast Asia Mediated, a ‘KITLV Verhandelingen series’ that is published by Brill Publishers.
Summer Academy Urban Transitions, The first event – a master class/summer academy is jointly organized by Leiden University, the University of Indonesia (Jakarta), and Gadjah Mada University (Yogyakarta). It brings together scientists and scholars from the faculties of medicine, humanities, social sciences, and environmental sciences to formulate interdisciplinary approaches to tackling a complex Indonesian and global challenge.
If you are not affiliated to Leiden University or University of Indonesia or Gadjah Mada University, but you are interested to join the academy, please contact us at info@universiteitleiden.id
