Luthfi Adam

Luthfi Adam (PhD, Northwestern University, 2020) is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Research, Monash University Indonesia. He was a Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks, Harvard University (2022–2023), and previously an EDGS Research Fellow at the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, Northwestern University. He holds an MA in Cultural and Media Studies from Universitas Gadjah Mada and a BA in Communication

Luthfi is a historian of Southeast Asia whose research brings together Indonesian studies, environmental history, and science and technology studies. His doctoral dissertation, "Cultivating Power: Buitenzorg Botanic Garden and Empire-Building in the Netherlands East Indies, 1745–1917," received the Harold Perkin Prize for best dissertation in Northwestern’s Department of History (2020). His first book, Cultivating Power: Botany and Empire in the Dutch East Indies, is under contract with Cornell University Press, and he has delivered the full manuscript. The book advances the concept of colonial verticality, showing how Dutch governance worked through elevation, climate gradients, and botanical zones, linking ports, lowlands, and highlands into an administrative ecology of cultivation and control.

His second book project, Sinking Capital, traces the water history of Jakarta through the idea of volume, examining how successive regimes tried to govern a three-dimensional delta of rivers, aquifers, wetlands, and coastal waters, and how these interventions produced subsidence and unequal urban vulnerability. He is also researching the history of food estates and food security as part of the LEAF Project (Land Ecosystem Agriculture and Food Security), funded by the Global Center on Biodiversity and Climate (GCBC), and has written for Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde (BKI).

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