NWO grant for research on cinematic beauty

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.

Cinematic beauty

Cinematic beauty is the pleasurable affective response that audiences experience when they consider a film beautiful. Since the beginning of cinema, movie-goers have encountered beauty in film’s many forms and genres, ranging from fiction films and animation to documentaries and avant-garde experiments. But astonishingly, scholars of film have never systematically studied cinematic beauty—a neglect all the more striking as the experience of cinematic beauty may have societal, political, and existential functions while encouraging well-being and pro-sociality. This project will investigate how cinematic beauty feels and what makes the experience valuable, both to individuals and society.

Read the article: Five questions about cinematic beauty

About the SSH Open Competition

With the NWO Open Competition-SSH, NWO Social Sciences and Humanities wants to offer researchers the opportunity to carry out research into a subject of their own choosing without any thematic constraints. The funding instrument aims to serve a broader group of researchers in different stages of their academic careers.The aim of the Open Competition – SSH is to facilitate excellent, non-programmed, curiosity-driven research that primarily addresses a social sciences or humanities research question and research problem.

The NWO Domain Social Sciences and Humanities has three different types of funding that you can submit proposals for in open competition. These are the small-scale (XS) and large-scale (M and L) grants. See below for more information per instrument and the links to the funding pages. Recently, two researchers from the Faculty of Arts were awarded Open Competition SSH-XS grants.