Jappie heads for Princeton

Saarah Jappie, a Masters Research Scholar with the Archive and Public Culture research initiative, has been accepted for fully-funded PhD studies in the graduate programme in History at Princeton University. The programme starts in September and runs for five years.

'I plan to extend my MA research and to work on Islamic writing cultures in an Indian Ocean context,' says Saarah, who will be working closely with Professor Michael Laffan, a specialist in Southeast Asian history. She plans to extend her work on the 'kietaabs' of Cape Town, to 'look more broadly at Islamic manuscript culture in an Indian Ocean context', although admits that the focus of her research may change as her PhD research unfolds.

Before embarking on her Masters at UCT, Jappie completed a Bachelor of International Studies at the University of New South Wales in Australia, majoring in Indonesian Studies and French. As part of this degree, she spent a year living, studying and researching in Central and West Java, Indonesia. This experience confirmed her passion for all things Indonesian, and she went on to complete my honours in Indonesian Studies focusing on representations of young women in contemporary Indonesian Islamic pop culture.

Her MA project brought together her background in South East Asian studies with a more recent interest in the history of Islam at the Cape.

'The Indian Ocean Basin encompasses a substantial and diverse section of the world. A developed history of trade, colonialism and slavery in this region contrasts a dearth of information about cultural interaction and dissemination in the Indian Ocean,' writes Jappie in her statement of purpose for Princeton.

'I will explore the spread of the Arabic-Malay script, jawi, and its use in three Indian Ocean localities: Indonesia, Sri Lanka and South Africa. I aim to study the history of the script's spread, the development of its use in each locality, and its role in the spread of ideas. This project will... contribute to a more complete understanding of the evolution of global writing cultures and to the study of cultural dissemination and diasporas in the Indian Ocean.'