NIAS Fellowships for Faculty of Arts researchers

The Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) has awarded a fellowship within the framework of the NIAS Fellowship to literature researchers Jacqueline Klooster, Luis Lobo-Guerrero, Arie van Steensel, Angeliek van Hout, Florian Lippert, and Alberto Godioli. The Fellowship enables them to carry out advanced research within the field of Social Sciences and Humanities. Every year, about 50 Fellowships are awarded to researchers from the Netherlands and abroad.

Jacqueline Klooster
Jacqueline Klooster (PhD 2009, UvA) is Assistant Professor of Ancient Greek and Latin Literature (Classics). She previously published works such as Poetry as Window and Mirror. Positioning the Poet in Hellenistic Poetry (Brill 2011); Classical Literature (AUP 2017); Homer and The Good Ruler in Antiquity and Beyond (Brill 2018).

In the study Leadership and Literary Art. How the ancient world evaluated literary works by its political leaders, Klooster investigates how Greek and Roman society evaluated and judged political leaders - who were also active in the literary sphere - but also what these findings can teach us about political leaders and literary artists of the time. The NIAS Fellowship stems from her earlier Marie Curie/Pegasus Long Fellowship at Ghent University.

Luis Lobo-Guerrero
Luis Lobo-Guerrero (PhD 2007, Lancaster University) is Professor of History and Theory of International Relations. He considers himself an epistemologist of order, power and governance. Among his publications is Insuring War: Sovereignty, Security and Risk (Routledge, 2013), part of a trilogy on security and power.

In his research Sixteenth Century Hispanic Globality as a Connectivity Effect, Lobo-Guerrero examines how sixteenth century Hispanic imperialism has contributed to contemporary Western culture. The NIAS Fellowship coincides with the launch of his most recent publication Mapping Connectivity and the Making of the European Empire (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

Arie van Steensel
Arie van Steensel (PhD 2010, Leiden University) is an Assistant Professor of Medieval History. His expertise focuses on the social and economic history of the European Middle Ages, in particular on the history of cities and nobility. His previous publications include Cities and Solidarities: Urban Communities in Pre-Modern Europe (Routledge, 2017); and “Measuring Urban Inequalities. Spatial Patterns of Service Access in Sixteenth-Century Leiden”, in G. Nigro ed., Economic Inequality in Pre-industrial Societies: Causes and Effect (Firenze University Press, 2020), 269-388.

In the research Corporations, Citizens, and the Formation of Urban Communities in Europe, 1350-1550, Van Steensel examines to what extent professional groups and associations (e.g. guilds) contributed to the formation of urban communities. His research not only provides new historical insights into the field of political participation and solidarity but also contributes to the broader discussion on the role of bottom-up forms within associations and the role of citizenship in the formation of communities.  

Angeliek van Hout
Angeliek van Hout (PhD 1996, University of Tilburg) is an Associate Professor of Linguistics. Her previous publications include “On the acquisition of event culmination”,  in Kristen Syrett and Sudha Arunachalam (Eds)., Semantics in Language Acquisition, (Trends in Language Acquisition Research Series, 2018), 95-121; Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across language (Linguistics. 5, 2020), 1447-1500; and Event endings in memory and language (Language, Cognition and Neuroscience, 2021).

In her project Exploring Late Language Development in School-Aged Children, Van Hout investigates language development in school-aged children at the age of five and six years. Previous research has shown that children around this age have reached many 'milestones' (fixed steps in language development), but that they have difficulty with more complex language phenomena, such as semantics (meaning of the sentence) and pragmatics (meaning of the context).

This project contributes to the NIAS Lorentz- Thematic Group project Accessible Tool for Language Assessment in Schools (ATLAS). Other researchers in this theme group are Maria Arche (University of Greenwich), Alexandra Perovic (University College London), Josep Quer (ICREA-Pompeu Fabra University), Petra Schulz (University of Frankfurt am Main).

Florian Lippert
Florian Lippert (PhD 2011, University of Freiburg) is Associate Professor of European Culture and Literature. Publications include Self-Reflection in Literature (ed., Brill/Rodopi, 2020) and Selbstreferenz in Literatur und Wissenschaft (Wilhelm Fink, 2013).

His recent research focuses on cultural constructions of normalcy. In his NIAS project Current Ideals of Cultural Sameness within Europe, Lippert investigates how political and public ideals of a European cultural identity have been developing and changing over the past years.

Alberto Godioli
Alberto Godioli (PhD 2012, Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa) is Senior Lecturer in European Culture and Literature. His research focuses in particular on humour and satire from the 18th century to the present. His publications include Laughter from Realism to Modernism (Routledge, 2015); La scemenza del mondo (PETS, 2011, Edinburgh Gadda First Prize).

In his research Who's the normie? Humour controversies, ambiguity, and polarization in contemporary Europe, Godioli explores the production and circulation of ambiguous political humor (from Charlie Hebdo's cartoons to viral memes), and how this type of humor is interpreted by different audiences across the political spectrum.

The research projects of Florian Lippert and Alberto Godioli are part of the NIAS Theme Group The Politics of (De)familiarization: The Common and the Strange in Contemporary Europe. Other researchers in this theme group are Professors Maria Boletsi (UvA/Leiden University) and Sarah de Lange (UvA).

NIAS Fellowship
The NIAS Individual Fellowship offers researchers within the period of five or ten months, the time and space to work on a topic of their own choice. With the help of the Fellowship, researchers can apply for a grant, a travel allowance for daily commuting, or subsidized housing in Amsterdam. The NIAS Theme Group brings together researchers from different backgrounds and with different expertise. For five months researchers work both individually and as a team on a clearly defined research topic.