Anne L. Foster was the Roosevelt Visiting Professor at the RIAS in the Fall of 2019.
Although this was Anne L. Foster’s first time in Middelburg, she had previously lived in the Netherlands for short periods to conduct research and write. She has always been interested in transnational and international histories of colonialism in Southeast Asia, and her work draws on sources in Britain, France, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United States. She has published on the interwar period in Southeast Asia, mostly notably her book Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941 (Duke, 2010). More recently, she has been working on a project about the transnational and international sources of changes in opium policy and consumption in Southeast Asia from the late 19th to the mid-20th century.
While at the RIAS this fall, Foster participated in several of the Institute’s activities. She provided a lecture at Leiden University, titled “Ends of Empire: The United States, Europe and Southeast Asia, 1912-1961” and taught a master class on the historiography of US empire. She spent her research time working on a new book, tentatively titled The Long War on Drugs, but also conducted research about US-Dutch relations about narcotics control for her other on-going book project, tentatively titled The State of Opium: Transnational Influences on Narcotics Policy in Southeast Asia.
Professor Foster has taught at Indiana State University, in Terre Haute, Indiana since 2003, and before that taught at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, North Hampshire. She also currently serves as co-editor of Diplomatic History, a position she has held since 2014. Diplomatic History is the premier journal in the United States for the study of the history of US foreign relations. In addition to Projections of Power, she has published articles in International History Review, Social History of Alcohol and Drugs, and Journal of the Canadian Historical Association as well as book chapters in Colonial Crucible, edited by Alfred McCoy and Francisco Scarano, Connected Histories, edited by Christopher Goscha and Christian Ostermann, and Powering up the Global, edited by Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton.
Read here Professor Foster’s report on her fellowship at the RIAS in the Fall 2019.