Caroline Schep is a PhD candidate at the Institute for History, working within Fenneke Sysling's ERC Starting Grant project COMET: Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia. Her interests include research ethics, Southeast Asian history, medical history, nationalism, (colonial) heritage studies and restitution.

More information about Caroline Schep

Fields of interest

My interests are in research ethics, Southeast Asian history, medical history, nationalism, (colonial) heritage studies and restitution - focusing usually on the late nineteenth and twentieth century. I have previously worked on national identities in (popular) culture, on the Holocaust and art restitution, on the history of science, and on Austrian history.

Research

I am currently bringing my fascination for culture, (national) resistance against oppression, and the history of (medical) science to my new research topic of drug testing in late colonial Indonesia and Malaysia. How were new drugs employed and tested in the colonies? What place did these drugs have in the medical market of Southeast Asia, and how did the population react to them? Who was involved: army doctors, plantation hospitals, medical missionaries...? How did these practices differ from what happened in Europe? What ethical considerations were behind experiments? And perhaps most fundamentally: in what sense were they experiments?
This research is part of Fenneke Sysling's ERC Starting Grant project COMET: Human Subject Research and Medical Ethics in Colonial Southeast Asia.

Curriculum Vitae

Caroline Schep studied History and Art History at Leiden University (cum laude) from 2016-2019. From 2019-2022, she completed Leiden's Research Master in History: Politics, Culture and National Identities (cum laude). During her studies, she worked as an assistant on prof.dr. Herman Paul's VICI-project Scholarly Vices: A Longue Durée History, and for the Foundation for Austrian Studies. In 2021, she worked on the Holocaust in Poland as a research intern at Centropa in Vienna. From 2021-2023, she was part of the Expert Centre for Restitution at the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. In 2023, she became Conservator of the archives and HDC | Protestant Heritage at the Vrije Universiteit, until she started her PhD trajectory in Leiden later that year.

Activities