Prior to joining AHM he was a Niels Stensen Postdoctoral Fellow in Postcolonial and Memory Studies consecutively affiliated with the University of Oxford hosted by Elleke Boehmer and the University of California, Los Angeles hosted by Michael Rothberg. This project comparatively investigated how the end of the Dutch colonial era is remembered in Dutch and Indonesian cinematic and literary case studies.

His doctoral dissertation on cultural memories of the Indonesian War of Independence in contemporary Indonesian popular culture was supervised by Jeroen de Kloet and Leonie Schmidt. He held visiting appointments at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), The University of Melbourne, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Since early 2019, Arps has been an editor of the scholarly journal Indische Letteren. He has recently joined the Editorial Board of the journal Popular Culture Review as well as the International Advisory Board of Southeast Asian Media Studies Journal.

He is currently working on the tentatively titled book project Memori Melompat: Jumping Memory, Popular Culture and the Indonesian War of Independence, which studies the ubiquitous representations of the war (1945-1949) in Indonesian popular culture. Together with AHM Visiting Scholar Rebekah Vince he is working on a collaborative project on postcolonial memories in the context of France, the Netherlands, Algeria, and Indonesia.