Roger Tol

Roger Tol (1950) is currently the director of KITLV Jakarta, the representative office of the KITLV in Indonesia. He studied Indonesian Languages and Cultures at the University of Leiden and received his PhD in 1989 for a dissertation on a Bugis heroic poem.

From 1982 until 2004 Roger Tol was affiliated part time with the University of Leiden, Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, as a research fellow and university lecturer (Indonesian, Malay, Bugis). Since 1986 he has worked at the library of the University of Leiden as a keeper of the collections on Southeast Asia and the Pacific. From 1989 to 1992 he worked at the Indonesian National Language Center in Jakarta with the Indonesian Linguistics Development Project (ILDEP) as a library consultant and publications officer. He resumed his positions of university lecturer and curator upon his return from Indonesia in July 1992. As of 1 September 1993, Roger Tol was appointed Chief Librarian of the KITLV, a position he held until his move to Jakarta in 2003. In 1998 and 1999 he was a consultant for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta and for the Higher Education Project in Indonesia (Indonesian Ministry of Education; with a loan from Asian Development Bank). From 1999 to 2003 he acted as an external examiner for Southeast Asian Studies and Language at the University of Hull.

Roger Tol has written extensively on contextual matters of the Indonesian literary heritage, especially concerning Bugis and Malay traditional texts.