RCMC/FEL Junior Fellowship

Students and scholars with a background in museum studies, anthropology, archaeology, art history or related disciplines can apply. We offer four stipends in total, each of
€ 1,500. The types of activities we support are related to conducting (ethnographic) research and/or publishing on the museum collections.

We appreciate creativity and innovative ideas. Activities we do not support are for instance the organisation of symposia and travel to conferences to present work.

*From 2012 to 2016, the RCMC/FEL Junior Fellowship program operated as the
Dr. Steven Engelsman Grants.

A jury will read the applications and select four of them. The jury is formed by:

• Mariana Françozo (Associate Professor of Museum Studies at the Faculty of Archaeology, Leiden University); 
• Peter Pels (Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Africa, Leiden University); and
• Wayne Modest (Head of the Research Center for Material Culture and Professor of Material Culture and Critical Heritage Studies (by special appointment) in the faculty of humanities at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam).

Successful applications will be announced on November 28, 2019, just prior to the lecture Photo-writing which is the 9th Adriaan Gerbrands Lecture. This year the lecture will be delivered by Sammy Baloji and Filip De Boeck. When you apply for the fellowship, you are expected to attend the lecture.

All applicants will be informed about the jury outcome via mail on November 29, 2019.

The grantees will be offered a RCMC/FEL Junior Fellowship for the proposed project. This fellowship includes:

• a workspace at the RCMC in Leiden, the Netherlands;
• access to the library documentation center, our collection database The Museum System (TMS) and the collections necessary for your research;
• a total stipend of €1,500 (you will receive 70% of the fellowship stipend at the beginning of the project and the remaining 30% of the stipend you receive when you have finished the project).
   

The conditions and expectations of the fellowship are as follows:

• contribute to the intellectual life of the RCMC;
• give a seminar presentation on your preliminary findings (if possible we encourage the using of examples from the museum collections), before the end of the fellowship period;
• produce a video/essay entry for the RCMC website, and/or a research article;
• provided the RCMC with any new information generated on the collections;
• make accessible to the RCMC any publications resulting your work at the center (if open access, agree to make these publications available on the RCMC website);
• acknowledge the support of the RCMC in any publications or work that result from the research conducted during your fellowship.

This fellowship is co-sponsored by the Foundation for Ethnology in Leiden (FEL), which also co-sponsors the annual Adriaan Gerbrands Lectures.

• Willem van Wijk – Will conduct comparative research on the representation of African art in South-Korea and the Netherlands.
• Adiva Lawrence – Will make a comparative study on museums and exhibitions from different contexts contribute to "re-archiving" black history and memory, with a focus on the memory of slavery.
• Jaimee Comstock-Skipp – Will rethink typologies and labels in her research: Cataloguing Persianate Arts of the Book in the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen.
• Rab Messina – Will analyse how designs can be made more sustainable for a wider audience by bringing technology and design closer together.
• Caroline Fernandes Caromano – Will research Amazonian Flames in European Houses which is an investigation of Fire as a Museum Object in ethnographic and archaeological collections from the Amazon in European museums.

• Sebastiaan van ‘t Holt - Practice of ayahuascashamanism in the Netherlands and Peru
• Giulia Golla Tunno - The presence and role of “art” within three national colonial museums in Europe
• Sita Reddy - The Hortus Indicus Malabaricus as a botanical book and as an ethnographic object