Three Open Competition SSH grants for Faculty of Arts researchers

The Dutch Research Council (NWO) has awarded Faculty of Arts researchers Peter Attema, Hans Huisman and René Cappers with a NWO Open Competition SSH grant in the field of social sciences and the humanities. The three researchers could apply for a maximum budget of 750,000 with each research proposal. This funding is without any thematic conditions, which gives them the opportunity to carry out research into a subject of their own choice. A total of 34 applications were accepted, nine of them came from  UG researchers. The Open Competition SSH aims to facilitate excellent, non-programmed, curiosity-driven research that primarily addresses a social sciences or humanities research question and research problem.

Peter Attema
Peter Attema is a Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Archaeology. In the research Salt and power. Early states, Rome and control of resources, he investigates the role of salt within the food economy. Following the discovery that salt production took place as far back as the Bronze Age, Attema examines with co-applicant Luca Alessandri how economies of scale came about and what the role of early Rome was as a stakeholder.

Hans Huisman
Hans Huisman is a Professor of Geoarchaeology and Archaeometry. In the research Finding Suitable Grounds: Exploiting buried and submerged Mesolithic-Neolithic landscapes to reconstruct the introduction of crop cultivation, he investigates, together with Kim Cohen (Utrecht University), how crop cultivation started in the Dutch lowlands. In their research, Huisman and Cohen make use of geological datasets, geophysical measurements, mechanical drilling and microscopic and palaeobotanical techniques. All these means will help them to investigate how and how quickly crop cultivation was introduced.

René Cappers
René Cappers is a Professor of Palaeobotany. In the research Ancient crops for a sustainable future? Millets and culture in India, he and UG researcher Peter Berger (Faculty of Theology) investigate the relationship between crop selection and culture. Millets belong to the founder crops of agriculture. Nowadays, they are even globally promoted as 'smart food' for the future. Drawing on the expertise of anthropologists and archaeobotanists, Cappers and Berger try to discover answers in contemporary India and throughout Indian history.

Open Competition SSH funding round
Researchers can apply for funding for different types of research projects. The research can have a disciplinary, interdisciplinary or cross-domain character and can focus on international collaboration between researchers and/or research groups. The NWO Social Sciences and Humanities domain has awarded a total of 22 million euros to research projects in the 2020 Open Competition SSH funding round.