Started April 29, 2021
Rose-Mary Allen
Biography Rose Mary Allen
Rose Mary Allen was born on December, 25 1950 in Curaçao. She visited the Fatima College primary school and afterwards the Maria College. From 1965-1969 she visited the Maria Immaculata Lyceum in Curaçao. When she finished her secondary school, she went to the Netherlands to study Anthropology. After her study, she returned to Curaçao and went to work for the Archeological and Anthropological Institute of the Netherlands Antilles (AAINA). There she worked as a staff member and a researcher. After the institute’s demise in 1998, she went to work as a researcher and lecturer at different institutes of higher learning.
As part of her research at the AAINA she conducted many oral history interviews with people of the older generations of the Dutch Caribbean islands in order to document their ways of life. Her book Ta Cuba mi ta bai (To Cuba I want to go) is based on the oral history of Curaçaoan workers who went to work in Cuba at the beginning of the XXth century. Her dissertation obtained in 2007 and entitled Di ki manera. A social history of Afro-Curaçaoans, 1863-1917 (2007) also draw largely on the collected oral histories.
She has published, co-published and edited several books and articles on the cultural and social history of the Dutch Caribbean islands with special attention on cultural heritage, migration and diaspora, gender studies and cultural diversity. She is a member of different national and international advisory boards regarding culture, gender and history of the Dutch Caribbean.
- In 2011 she won the Curaçao’s Boeli van Leeuwen Prize for her work on oral history.
- In 2015, she received the Knight in the Netherlands Order of Orange-Nassau and has also been awarded the 2015 Cola Debrot Prize, Curaçao’s most prestigious national award in the area of culture, art and science. She is a Caribbean postgraduate research partner in the NWO project Traveling Caribbean heritage, a four year project (2017-2021), funded by the Caribbean Program of NWO, the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research, joint project of the. (KITLV/Leiden University, Erasmus University Rotterdam),University of Aruba and Fuhikubo, Bonaire and the University of Curaçao. She is the Caribbean research partner in NWO project Cultural practices of citizenship under conditions of fragmented sovereignty: Gendered and sexual citizenship in Curaçao and Bonaire, University of Amsterdam in partnership with the University of Curaçao.
In 2021 she has been appointed as Extraordinary Professor in the field of Culture, Community and History with a focus on local and Caribbean perspectives at the Faculty of Arts. University of Curaçao Dr. Moises da Costa Gomez
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