News

Dr. Julian Hanich has been awarded a research grant from NWO for research on the experience of cinematic beauty. The grant is from the Open Competition M programme, which is designed for free, curiosity-driven research within the social sciences and humanities.

Dr. Werner Distler and Dr. Eske van Gils have both been awarded research grants from the Gratama Foundation. Distler is receiving the grant for his project Hidden Archives of Peace and Conflict, Van Gils for her project on political cooperation between Turkmenistan and the European Union.

Recently, the University of the North awarded the first grants worth €75,000 from its Booster Fund. A project from ICOG was selected: ‘Digital literacy and inclusion; the basis for broad prosperity’ by Prof. Marcel Broersma , Professor of Media and Journalism Studies.

The Graduate School for the Humanities offers 3 PhD positions (for 4 years) in the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG). We invite you to design your own research project related to the research in one of ICOG’s five research centres.

The application deadline is 1 June 2023.

We are inviting applications for two fully funded, four-year PhD positions in Classical Literature within the research project Roman Making and its Meanings: Representations of Manual Creation in the Literature and Art of Imperial Rome (Acronym: FACERE), financed by the European Research Council (ERC) and led by Dr Bettina Reitz-Joosse.

The application deadline is 25 May 2023.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero has been awarded a Franklin Fellowship Grant from the American Philosophical Society to conduct material research on a Portolan Chart of the Pacific coast of South America from around 1540, kept at the Library of Congress.

Dr. Kiki Santing and Dr. Suzanne Manizza-Roszak have both been awarded a research grant from NWO. This is a grant from the Open Competition SHH-XS pilot program with a maximum budget of 50,000 euro to enable proposals for curiosity-driven, fundamental research in the research fields covered by the NWO SSH.

PhD student Krina Huisman researched how we can ascribe meaning to the loss of a loved one by narrating that loss in the form of a story. She studied different types of books on grief and distinguished four ways in which bereavement literature narrates the subject. She concludes that grief is not at all as unique as we think it is. Huisman will be awarded a PhD by the University of Groningen on 13 April.

The University of Groningen’s Architecture and Urbanism invites scholars from humanities and social sciences – amongst others – to contribute with projects exploring the heritage of the state socialist architecture and urbanism and the accompanying processes. We are looking for proposals investigating the conservation and preservation of modernist heritage as well as proposals examining the historicization of modernist architectural vocabulary in the contemporary era.

The submission deadline is 15 May 2023.

During the Second World War, more Jewish residents of five municipalities in the province of Groningen were killed than previously had been estimated. This is the conclusion of research conducted by Richard Paping, a historian at the University of Groningen. It was previously thought that 15% of the Jewish residents of these municipalities survived the war. However, it now appears that less than 10% survived. The contrast with the national survival rate of 27-29% is therefore much larger than previously estimated.

Last autumn, anger over the death of Jina ‘Mahsa’ Amini led to mass protests in Iran, and there is still a lot of unrest. It was not the first time Iranians took to the streets: the history of feminist resistance goes back to far beyond the foundation of the Islamic republic in 1979. Dr Donya Ahmadi, assistant professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Arts, researches and documents the role of female activists in the political developments of 20th and 21st-century Iran.

Greek myths: exciting, mysterious, and sometimes bizarre tales from the Antiquity. They often address ethical issues and abrasive conflicts— including disagreements between men and women. Classic mythological stories have been written in a certain Zeitgeist and from a specific, often male, perspective. But how would these stories sound if we looked at them through a current lens, and from a female perspective?

This unique conference addresses critical European-Latin American relationships in the fields of history and art history before c. 1945. Groningen, as a relatively small, old university city in Europe, and São Paulo, Latin America’s largest metropolis, offer an apparent stark contrast. Yet, both cities have been defined by their leading roles in education and culture. The links between Europe and Latin America in the Humanities are often simplified or overlooked altogether. By acting as catalyser, this conference aims to bring together PhD candidates and early career researchers to discuss forgotten global synergies between our two regions from the early colonial period to modernity.

The submission deadline is 14 April 2023.

Dr. Lisa Gaufman, Assistant Professor in Russian Discourse and Politics, investigates the rhetoric of the Kremlin on social media. A story about online cartoons and polarizing troll accounts masquerading as concerned citizens.

Dr Hannah Malone, Assistant Professor in Contemporary History at the University of Groningen, will be NWIB Visiting Professor 2023 at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome. As NWIB Visiting Professor at the KNIR, Hannah will investigate what happened to Italy’s Fascist Party Headquarters ( case del fascio ) after the fall of Mussolini’s dictatorship in 1945.

Dr Benjamin Leruth, assistant professor in European Politics and Society at the Faculty of Arts, has been awarded an Open Competition XS grant for his project Exploring the Politics of Long-Termism (EXPLOT). The Dutch Research Council awards these grants of max €50.000 to researchers with a promising idea or an innovative and high-risk initiative.

Dr Anne M. Martínez, assistant professor of American Political and Cultural Theory, with four other researchers across the Netherlands has received an NWO Advancing Equity in Academia through Innovation grant for a three-year project entitled Disrupting Sameness in Dutch Academia. The project will design interventions to address individual, interpersonal, and institutional barriers to equity and inclusion for people from migration backgrounds in selected programs at the University of Groningen, TU-Delft, University of Utrecht Medical Center, and Wageningen University.

Dr Léonie de Jonge , assistant professor of European Politics and Society at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen, has been appointed as a member of the Young Academy (De Jonge Akademie). The Young Academy is a platform within the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) for early-career, world-class scientists and scholars with an innovative vision on science and scholarship and related policy.

Dr Francesco Giumelli, associate professor of International Relations and International Organizations at the Faculty of Arts, and Dr Pim Geelhoed, associate professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure at the Faculty of Law, are participating in an international research project on informal economies that was recently awarded a European grant of €3.8 million. The project funds 15 PhD students, two of whom are appointed at the University of Groningen: one in the Faculty of Arts and one in the Faculty of Law.

Dr Robert Prey, assistant professor of Media Studies at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant of €1.5 million. For the next five years, this grant will allow him to conduct research into the way in which streaming platforms and social media platforms influence the creativity, identity, and working conditions of musicians, and how the music industry specifically and our culture in general is influenced by the 'platformization’ of our society.

New forms of extremism are on the rise in the Northern Netherlands. Jihadism only plays a limited role in the three northern provinces, according to a research report that will be published today. The report was drawn up by UG researchers Pieter Nanninga, Leonie de Jonge, and Fleur Valk, by order of the Municipality of Groningen.

Today, Yael de Haan has been appointed Professor by special appointment of Local Public Broadcasting at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen. The new chair will form an important contribution to the academic and policy insights into the role and function of the local public broadcaster within society.

Dr Jacqueline Klooster, Assistant Professor of Classical Languages & Cultures at the UG's Faculty of Arts, has been awarded a €37,500 grant from the Lira Fund (Lira fonds.) The grant will allow her to write a popular science book on retellings of classical literary works from a female perspective. The book will be titled De Bestseller-Muze. Pop-feminisme en de oudheid in populaire fictie (The Bestseller Muse. Pop-feminism and antiquity in popular fiction), and is expected to be published in spring 2025.

The Dutch network of International Political Sociology has launched the Call for Papers for its seminar series 2023. As a transdisciplinary approach to the study of International Relations, International Political Sociology (IPS) offers alternative lenses to understand global politics and social relations through a wide range of analytical perspectives and empirical research strategies.
The submission deadline is 9 December 2022.

This month, several new PhD candidates are beginning their research projects at ICOG: Theresa Atutu, Nathalie Fridzema, Orfeas Koidis, Marije Miedema, Tholithemba Ndaba, and Maud Rebergen. It is our pleasure to introduce them to you.

CRASIS invites applications for its twelfth Annual Meeting and Masterclass, which will take place on 20 (Masterclass) and 21 (Annual Meeting) February 2023. This year, our theme will be ‘Sensing, Making, Relating: Ontologies of the Divine’, and we are honored to welcome Prof. Esther Eidinow (University of Bristol) as keynote speaker and master.

The submission deadline is 1 December 2022.

Dr. Federico Pianzola, associate professor of computational humanities, has been awarded an ERC Starting Grant for his project GOLEM: Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models. The €1.2 million European grant will allow him to spend the next five years conducting large-scale research on changes in how people write fiction and how it affects readers. Pianzola will begin his research in January.

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association has nominated Julian Hanich, Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Arts, Culture and Media program, to become a voter of the Golden Globes 2023. He'll be one of 200 voters from 62 countries worldwide to decide on the winners of what is often considered the second most prestigious US-American film award after the Oscars.

Prof. Sabrina Corbellini conducts research into the history of reading in premodern Europe. Her research disproves persistent prejudices about the ‘dark’, ‘undeveloped’ Middle Ages. ‘The ability to read is essential to the functioning of society. This was the case in the Middle Ages, just as it is today.’

The Voices of Women project, an initiative by researchers from various European universities including the University of Groningen, was recently awarded an Erasmus+ subsidy. The aim of the project is to include female musicians and poets in the canon and to allow their voices to be heard in music teaching across Europe.

This month, five PhD candidates are beginning their research projects at ICOG: Alina Achenbach, Kai Hopen, Daniel Leix Palumbo, Pim Schievink, and Joanna Zienkiewicz. It is our pleasure to introduce them to you.

From August 2022 to August 2023, ICOG will be joined by visiting research fellow Pete Porter. Dr Porter is a Professor of Film in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, where he also serves as Chair, at Eastern Washington University. During his fellowship at ICOG, Dr Porter will finish the book Moving Animals: from Marching Penguins to Octopus Teachers, which adopts a cognitive-affective lens to describe how films express animal perspectives.

The American Academy of Research Historians of Medieval Spain ( AARHMS ) is pleased to announce the organization of a panel at the 2023 International Medieval Congress in Leeds entitled "Relics and Reliquaries in Iberia, c. 1000-1400: Stories, Places, and Identities". This panel, within the world's leading annual gathering of medieval experts, intends to unravel the overlooked entanglements of relics and reliquaries in the lives of medieval individuals from different social strata.

The submission deadline is 23 September 2022.

The Voices of Women project, an Erasmus+ funded joint project with the University of Groningen, The University of Stavanger, The Arctic University of Norway (Tromsø), and The University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar invites paper presentations from teachers, graduate students, and scholars interested in the theme of musical authorship in connection to women’s voices. We understand voices metaphorically, artistically, and literally to include women or women-identifying genders in a variety of roles whose creative musical ‘voices’ contribute to the authorship of a particular body of work. The two-day symposium explores this theme of authorship in relation to the sub-themes of music materialities and cultural transfer.

The submission deadline is 31 September 2022.

Dr Bettina Reitz-Joosse, associate professor of Latin Language and Literature, has received an ERC Starting Grant for the project FACERE. Roman Making and its Meanings: Representations of Manual Creation in the Literature and Visual Culture of Imperial Rome. The 1.5 million euro grant is awarded to excellent researchers to promote pioneering research in Europe.

In the context of the sectoral plan for the Humanities entitled ‘Tradition in transition’ and the University’s strategic profile, the three Humanities faculties of the University of Groningen are offering 14 postdoc positions. We are looking for expertise and experience in the fields of humane AI, cultural heritage & identity, languages & cultures, and communication, information & social inequalities in a digital world.

The application deadline is 28 August 2022.

Three researchers from the Groningen Institute for the Study of Culture, Dr Eleftheria Ioannidou, Dr Ksenia Robbe and Dr Megan Williams, have been awarded individual NIAS fellowships. This allows them to carry out projects at NIAS (Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Science) in an interdisciplinary, collaborative, slow-science environment.

Dr Francesco Giumelli , associate professor in International Relations and International Organisations of the Faculty of Arts, and Dr Pim Geelhoed , associate professor of Criminal Law and Criminal Procedure of the Faculty of Law, have been awarded a Cost Action funding. The funding will facilitate the researchers in organising network meetings, conferences and workshops on the theme of illicit trade, intended for experts from various fields of study from 55 universities within Europe and three outside of Europe. One of the experts working on the project is AssistentProfessor Dr George Azzopardi of the RUG's Faculty of Science and Engineering, who was also involved in the funding application.

Geoffrey Hobbis (CMJS) and his research team are launching their project ‘Fera-i-asi: Digitizing the Island Builders of the Lau Lagoon (Malaita), Solomon Islands’. With funding from the Endangered Material Knowledge Programme, this project seeks to document the materials, processes, and techniques found in the tool kits of artificial island builders in the Lau Lagoon, Malaita, Solomon Islands.

The University of Groningen has been awarded a large Horizon Europe grant to study the politics and governance of the post-pandemic. The project, named REGROUP (Rebuilding governance and resilience out of the pandemic) will be based at the Faculty of Arts and be coordinated by Dr Piero Tortola, who will lead a consortium of 14 universities and think tanks across Europe.

REGROUP will develop comprehensive diagnostic and normative analyses of the socio-political implications of Covid-19, and formulate policy advice for European Union policy-makers and other stakeholders on how to best (re)configure public policies and institutions for the years to come.

More than ten years after the publications of the widely acclaimed Kings' biographies ( Koning Willem I by Jeroen Koch, Koning Willem II by Jeroen van Zanten en Koning Willem III by Dik van der Meulen), will follow from 2025 (expected date) the Queens' biographies. Alpita de Jong writes the biography of Wilhelmina of Prussia, Petra van Langen of Anna Pavlovna, Leonieke Vermeer of Sophie of Wurtemberg, and Monica Soeting of Emma of Waldeck-Pyrmont.

The Universities of Groningen and Hamburg are funding a joint project of Dr David Shim (CIRR, Groningen) and Dr Delf Rothe (IFSH, Hamburg), entitled ‘Between fear and hope: Security imaginaries of climate change and emotions in the Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion campaigns’ (SECIMA).

The project studies how the two key global movements of our time - Fridays for Future and Extinction Rebellion - use images and other visuals to narrate climate change as a threat to human, national or global security and at the same time legitimize and justify their activism. SECIMA will contribute to the emerging scholarly debate on visual narratives in global politics, (self-)legitimation of social movements as global political actors and visual methods in the study of IR.