5 NWO XS grants for the Faculty of Humanities
NWO XS grants
Five researchers from Leiden University have been awarded an Open Competition Domain Science ENW XS grant by the Dutch Research Council for their research projects.
The Open Competition Domain Science XS grants of up to € 50,000 are intended to support promising ideas and to facilitate innovative and more speculative initiatives. The proposed research is groundbreaking and high-risk. What counts is that all results, be they positive or negative, help advance science.
Exclusion and its Echoes: Chinese Laborers in the Dutch World War II Effort and the Enduring Cost of Racial Governance – Vincent Chang
This project examines how colonial labor policies governing Chinese seamen in Dutch merchant navy ships during World War II disrupted both wartime Allied logistics and postwar memory in the Netherlands. Using historical, memory, and postcolonial approaches, it foregrounds not the moral but the immediate and enduring strategic costs of racial governance, culminating in the 1942 April Murders and their contested commemoration. Drawing on unexplored Dutch, Caribbean, and Chinese sources, the study reveals how Chinese communities, long marginalized, are commemorated in Curaçao yet remain absent from Dutch remembrance narratives of inclusiveness, exposing the enduring legacy of racial inequality and institutional forgetting.
Consenting to censorship? European authors and alterations to their books in China - Svetlana Kharchenkova
Many foreign books get censored when translated and published in China, due to the political context. Study of contemporary book censorship is often limited to what happens within authoritarian states. This project innovatively studies censorship as a transnational and interactional process. Chinese editors often ask foreign authors, including those in liberal societies, to agree to alterations to their books as a condition for publication. This project investigates how European authors consider censorship and make choices regarding changes to their books. This project thus studies how understandings and decisions made in liberal societies in Europe contribute to book censorship in China.
Knowledge as a Mirror of Power: European networks connecting academia, colonies and politics in the age of modern imperialism – Lauren Lauret
What role did personal connections and double-hatting play at the nexus of colonial knowledge and political power in British, French and Dutch academies of sciences between 1870-1940? This pilot study traces people who operated at the intersections between domains that are usually allocated to either colonial, intellectual or national political history. Uncovering the personal ties between the colonies, academia and politics reveals otherwise hidden power relations. From a societal perspective, understanding this colonial dimension of power and knowledge creation and circulation and its legacies must be part of the ongoing efforts of decolonisation.
Reinvention and Redirection: How Dutch academia negotiated decolonisation and discovered development, 1950s-1970s (R&R) - Anne-Isabelle Richard
Dutch universities have been deeply involved in colonial knowledge production and the training of students for the colonies. Recently, they have been examining their colonial histories. But what happened at the end of empire? Did these colonial connections and attitudes change? R&R examines how universities reinvented themselves from institutions deeply rooted in colonial practice to development actors. Through two case studies analyzing courses aimed at overseas and at Dutch students and the research underpinning the courses in the 1950s-1970s, R&R investigates why Dutch academia played such an important role in international development and what this means for our understanding today.
Reassessing creole exceptionalism: Insights from large speech corpora - Benjamin Storme
Creole languages are often described as having unique properties—a debated idea known as ‘creole exceptionalism’. However, most research has focused on grammar, while spoken aspects of these languages have received far less attention. This project uses a recently developed, extensive corpus of spoken Haitian Creole to explore this idea further. We investigate two specific cases that hint at unexpected complexity in the language’s sounds, potentially challenging traditional assumptions on creoles. The project will also lay the ground for a broader investigation of creole languages using speech data.