by Sue Maguire
From the February, 2021 issue
It's hard to keep up with Jatin Dua. Polite and upbeat, he first showed up in Ann Arbor in 2014 as an assistant professor of anthropology at the U-M. Before that, he spent his childhood in India and California, completed his undergraduate degree at Reed College in Oregon, studied law in Cairo, did research in London and East Africa, and got his PhD at Duke before coming to Ann Arbor. He teaches classes on piracy, history, anthropology, and anthropology of law.
In 2016 Dua took a residential fellowship at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands in order to have time to write a book on maritime piracies in Somalia and the Indian Ocean. Netherlands native Sanne Ravensbergen was finishing her dissertation there on criminal law in Indonesia under Dutch rule. A specialist in Dutch colonialism, she was looking at the colonial regime's 'multiethnic courts, which included Dutch presidents, Javanese judges, and Islamic and Chinese advisors.
