Mikki Stelder (they/them) is a researcher, educator, and writer whose work traverses oceans, anticolonial struggles, and queer transfeminist thought and praxis. Their forthcoming monograph, Contract Colonialism, examines the colonial-legal imaginary of early-modern legal scholar, Dutch East India Company spokesman, and so-called founding father of international law Hugo Grotius. Diving into the afterlives of Grotius’s legal imaginary, the book develops the analytic of contract colonialism to better understand how colonial-legal forms of contract and consent facilitated the entangled processes of genocide, chattel slavery, and ecocide and rendered them innocent. Stelder’s work as a researcher and educator focuses on how water holds potential for crafting radical and liberatory futures and they have also published on anticolonial-queer politics and Palestine liberation, which continues to inform their work.
They are an Assistant Professor of Global Arts and Politics at the University of Amsterdam and former recipient of the Marie Sklowdowska Curie Global Fellowship.
Stelder’’s work has appeared in Postcolonial Studies, Angelaki: journal for the theoretical humanities, Settler Colonial Studies, Radical History Review, The Journal of Palestine Studies, Feral Feminisms, Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies and the edited collections Global Trajectories of Queerness: Same Sex Politics in the Global South (eds. Ashley Tellis and Sruti Bala, co-authored with Haneen Maikey), The Future of the Dutch Colonial Past (Amsterdam University Press), and Law and Humanities in a Pandemic (London University Press). They have also written op-eds for Mondoweiss (co-author Ramzy Kumsieh), OneWorld.org, Trouw, and Pinkwatching Israel.
They are a co-editor of The Gloria Wekker Reader (Duke University Press, 2026 with Chandra Frank and Nancy Jouwe) and Oceans as Archives (Routledge, 2025 with Kristie Patricia Flannery and Renisa Mawani).
They have (co-)curated and participated in numerous public programs and exhibitions including Mo
ving Together: Art, Education and Activism - a Week with Angela Y. Davis (curator), Oceans as Archives (curator), Sonic Acts Biennal (speaker), Unimaginable: Clarion Calls from the Rising Sea (artist), Rietveld Studium Generale (speaker), Surinamensium Part I (artist), Queeristan: Autonomous Queer Festival for Arts and Politics (organizer).
Photograph by Zola Zakiya