Martijn Eickhoff to become new director of NIOD

As from 1 September 2021, Martijn Eickhoff will be appointed by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) as the director of the NIOD Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies. He will succeed Frank van Vree, who is leaving his position due to his pending retirement but will stay on at the NIOD in a different position.

Eickhoff (1967) has been a senior researcher at the NIOD since 2006. Two years ago, he was appointed Professor by special appointment of the Archaeology and Heritage of War and Mass Violence at the Groningen Institute of Archaeology (GIA) of the University of Groningen (UG). He studies the history, cultural dimensions and effects of large-scale violence and changeovers of power in Europe and Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries.

An important research theme in Eickhoff’s work is the relationship between politics, heritage and violence. In collaboration with Marieke Bloembergen of the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), he is studying the transformations of archaeological sites in colonial and post-colonial Indonesia. This resulted in the monograph The Politics of Heritage in Indonesia. A Cultural History (CUP), published in 2020.

Eickhoff studied at the University of Amsterdam and the Freie Universität in Berlin before obtaining a PhD at the University of Amsterdam for his study into Dutch archaeology and its confrontation with national socialism.

In 2020, Eickhoff was interviewed by the UG about the vulnerability and resistance of heritage in times of war. Click here for a full overview of Martijn Eickhoff’s projects, publications and additional positions.