Jan Bremen - Curriculum Vitae#

Jan Breman majored in the social sciences at the University of Amsterdam and specialized in South and Southeast Asian Studies.

In 1962 he became a staff member, later reader and professor at Erasmus University (the former Netherlands Economic School) in Rotterdam, where he held a chair in the sociology of development since 1974. His transfer in 1987 to Amsterdam University, to teach comparative sociology, coincided with the establishment of the post-graduate Centre for Asian Studies Amsterdam. He was Dean of CASA and the Amsterdam School for Social Science Research with which CASA merged, until September 1998. As a part-time assignment he was also appointed extraordinary professor of sociology at the Institute of Social Studies in The Hague. He continues to be affiliated to the Amsterdam School but is also Fellow of the International Institute of Asian Studies.

Jan Breman has been visiting professor in India (Institute of Economic Growth, Delhi) and in Indonesia (Agricultural University, Bogor), and has travelled widely on short-term academic visits to other Asian countries. He has carried out consultancy missions in the Asian region for ILO, UNRISD, ESCAP, Asian Development Bank, as well as for various non-government agencies and for the Dutch Ministry of Development Cooperation.

He has been, or still is, on the editorial board of various professional journals: The Journal of Peasant Studies, The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, Modern Asian Studies, Development and Change, The Indian Journal of Labour Economiscs, The Journal of Agrarian Change. For a number of years he has been a member of the board of the Royal Netherlands Institute for Anthropology and Languages (KITLV), the South Asia Committee of the American Social Science Research Council, the Committee on Asian Studies of the European Science Foundation, the International Institute of Asian studies, the Netherlands Foundation for Tropical Research (WOTRO) and the International Institute of Social History (IISG). He is fellow of the Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the Academia Europaea.

Breman’s research interests are: employment and labour relations in contemporary Asia, history of colonialism, labour migration, conditions of poverty and the social question in a global perspective. On these themes he has supervised twenty-five ph.d. theses.