Bambang Purwanto is Professor of History at the Faculty of Cultural Sciences, Universitas Gadjah Mada (UGM). An alumnus of UGM, he holds a Master’s degree in Southeast Asian History and a PhD from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. His influential doctoral dissertation is titled “From Dusun to Market: Native Rubber Cultivation in Southern Sumatra, 1890–1940.” He is widely recognised for his expertise in economic history and historiography. He has since become a leading voice in shifting historical narratives towards an Indonesian-centric perspective. With a career spanning decades, he continues to shape the study of Indonesian history through his dedicated teaching and influential scholarship.

Farabi Fakih is a historian and lecturer at the Department of History and head of the Master’s Program in History at the Faculty of Cultural Science, Universitas Gadjah Mada, Yogyakarta, Indonesia. He has a broad range of interests, which include the history of the decolonisation of the state and management. This included the management of knowledge, natural resources and urban spaces. He has published on political history, state decolonisation, settler colonial urbanism and others. He is currently developing research into local ontologies and their relation to resource management of communities, companies and states. As part of this exploration, he is looking into the entwined relationship between ecological restoration, community formation, heritage and the question of return.

Mayco A. Santaella is Professor and Dean for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Sunway University. He studied at the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa as an East-West Centre Fellow, researching the music and dance traditions of the extended Sulu Zone (east Malaysia, southern Philippines, and eastern Indonesia) and their links to the Nusantara region. He conducted research for his doctoral studies in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, as a Fulbright research grant recipient. His books include Made in Nusantara: Studies in Popular Music (Routledge, 2021), Popular Music in East and Southeast Asia: Sonic (under)Currents and Currencies (Sunway University Press, 2022), Performing Arts and the Royal Courts of Southeast Asia (Brill, 2023 & 2024), and The Sulu Zone: A Maritime Cultural Complex (Sunway University Press, 2024).

Vincent Kuitenbrouwer is a senior lecturer of History of International Relations at the University of Amsterdam. He specialises in nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial history, and has a special interest in colonial media networks. He currently works on Dutch international radio-broadcasting in the late colonial period and the era of decolonisation. Recent publications include: with S. Potter et al., The Wireless World. Global Histories of International Radio Broadcasting (Oxford University Press, Oxford 2022); 'Radio as a Tool of Empire. Intercontinental Broadcasting from the Netherlands to the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s and 1930s', Itinerario, vol. 40:1 (2016) 83-103 and ‘“From Heart to Heart”: Colonial Radio and the Dutch Imagined Community in the 1920s’, in: G. Blok et al. eds., Imagining Communities: Historical Reflections on the Process of Community Formation (Amsterdam University Press 2018) 113-131.