Dr. Paul Willem Johan van der Veur was Professor Emeritus of political science at Ohio University. Born to Dutch parents in the Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), he attended school in Surabaya, Java, where his father practiced as a physician (he also briefly attended a lycée in Hilversum, in the Netherlands). He fought against the Japanese in World War II, was captured and spent part of his imprisonment in the infamous Changi prison in Singapore. After the war, having obtained a scholarship to attend Swarthmore College (Swarthmore, Pennsylvania), he moved to the U.S.A. He later earned a master’s degree from the University of Minnesota, and received his Ph.D. in political science from Cornell University in 1955. He taught at Yale University, the University of Hawaii, the Australian National University and Northern Illinois University. In 1967, Professor van der Veur became the founding director of the Southeast Asia Program at Ohio University. He retired from the classroom in 1991, but remained active as a scholar to the end of his life.