Cees Fasseur, born at Balikpapan, Indonesia, in 1938. Ph.D. from Leiden University. Professor of Southeast Asian History at Leiden University. († 2016)
Fellow (1 September 1996 – 30 June 1997)
The purpose of my stay at NIAS was to write the first volume of a biography on Queen Wilhelmina, the grandmother of the present queen of the Netherlands. In the previous years I had done the necessary research for the book. Queen Wilhelmina lived from 1880 to 1962. Her inauguration took place in 1898 whereafter she reigned for half a century until 1948. In her long reign she took on Victorian dimensions and proportions. My biography is based on original source material from the Royal Archives in which the private archives of Queen Wilhelmina and her husband, Prince Hendrik are deposed. Both archives were made accessible to historical research for the first time. My aim was to write an original biography with avoidance of the presumptuous and (often dull) character of an ‘official’ biography.
I finished the first volume at the end of my stay at NIAS. The result is an annotated and complete manuscript of 526 pages that I have already sent to the publisher and some interested experts. The book will be published in March 1998.
The second volume is planned for the year 2000.