Luthfi Adam

Luthfi Adam (Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2020) is a research fellow at the Institute of Advanced Research at Monash Indonesia. Luthfi also a fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University, during the 2022-2023 academic year. Before joining Monash Indonesia, Luthfi was an EDGS research fellow at Buffet Institute for Global Affairs, Northwestern University. Buffet Institute continues to support Luthfi’s research by granting him a visiting scholar position until the end of the 2023 academic term.

Luthfi is a historian of modern Southeast Asian and environmental history. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745-1917,” won the Harold Perkin Prize for the best dissertation in the Department of History, Northwestern University, in 2020. Luthfi is currently revising his dissertation into a book manuscript. The book discusses the history of colonial gardens and botanical practices in the expansion of colonial science, plantations, agriculture, and statecraft in the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Netherlands East Indies.

Luthfi’s second book project explores the history of environmental degradation of colonial and postcolonial Greater Jakarta. The project seeks historical explanations of pressing environmental issues faced by the environment and population of Greater Jakarta, most notably deforestation, air, river, and marine pollution, urban development, waste problems, sinking lands, and climate change.ing lands, and climate change.

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