Dr. Wim De Winter (Ph.D., Ghent University) is an interdisciplinary world- and cultural historian specialised in histories of, on and across the Indian & Pacific Ocean. He obtained his Ph.D at Ghent University in 2021 with a dissertation on the cultural interactions and performative exchanges of the Ostend Company (GIC) in 18th-century China and India. He is currently also employed as post-doctoral researcher at KU Leuven, within the ERC AdG project TRANSPACIFIC, where he studies exchanges and informal agents involved in piracy, smuggling, and maritime knowledge transfer in the transpacific world (from the 16th- to the 18th-century). He has previously published on gift-exchange in Japan, intercultural interactions in the Indian Ocean World, and knowledge gathering in sailors' technical traditions. His current research perspective includes 'global microhistorical' approaches to social and cultural interactions in early-modern maritime Asia and the Pacific, and colonial exoticism. In 2023 he teaches religious/cultural history as well as historical anthropology as guest professor at Ghent University, and 'global perspectives on history' at KU Leuven. He is a member of the Royal Historical Society, International Maritime History Association, and the Society for Nautical History.
