21 November 2019
Finishing Fellowships provide support to self-supported PhD candidates who are close to completing their degrees, offering them the financial security and the freedom to focus on the last year of PhD dissertation writing. The seven candidates are connected to the research schools Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (ACLC), Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) and Amsterdam School of Historical Studies (ASH) and their fellowships are tenable from 1 January 2020. An overview of the candidates’ projects can be found below.
Özge Calafato (ASCA)
This research project focuses on photographic representations of the urban upper and upper-middle classes in Turkey in the 1920s and the 1930s in the context of a society undergoing rapid secularization and modernization. It investigates the ways in which newly minted Turkish citizens used portrait photography in and outside the studio to perform and negotiate a new national identity following the foundation of the Republic in 1923.
Wouter Capitain (ASCA)
In this dissertation, I study the intersection between musicology and postcolonial studies through an in-depth analysis of Edward Said’s writings on music. I argue that Said’s work, traversing as it does the fields of postcolonial theory, political activism, and musicology, itself requires a polyphonic perspective to make this musical dimension audible and to analyze how it intersects with his interventions in postcolonial theory and politics. By studying unpublished materials – the scarcely examined Edward W. Said Papers, which preserve a comprehensive collection of his drafts, lecture notes, teaching materials, personal correspondence, and audiovisual materials – I move beyond the academic fixation on and authority of published texts, and instead foreground the multivocality of his legacy.
Hongmei Fang (ACLC)
The meanings and functions of Mandarin sentence-final particles are notoriously elusive and surprisingly controversial. Thus, most research is devoted to clarifying the functions of individual particles in specific contexts, with much less attention being paid to the explanations of their highly restricted order. This project aims first of all to explore the functions of individual particles, with particular focus on le, ba and ne, then to find the full range of combinatory possibilities of particles, and finally to provide a systematic explanation for it.
Sophie van Ginneken (ASH)
Since the rise of mass tourism, in the first half of the 19th century, Amsterdam has changed from a trade and production city into a site of pleasure. Tourism has helped shape this: to a large extent, it determines today’s image and usage of the city, and forms the basis for many economic and cultural facilities. Architecture is an important component of this process of touristification. Because the touristic experience is, in essence, a visual practice, buildings – stone expressions of history and local identity – play a key role. This brings me to formulate this study’s central question: how has the touristic image of Amsterdam transformed since 1840, and what is the role of architecture in this process?
Annemiek Houwen (ASH)
Pupils not only create a perception of the past based on the stories they are handed by their teacher, textbooks and other educational tools, but they also learn that these stories are constructs and develop skills to critically analyse given stories as well as learning how to create an adequate perception by themselves. In many countries, the history textbook is leading in the classroom, and this is also the case for history education in the Netherlands. This dissertation researches which perceptions are presented in the textbooks, and which perceptions are formed by pre-university upper secondary education pupils (vwo bovenbouw) with regard to the theme ‘The development of the Dutch state and democracy’ and to which extent they can critically approach these perceptions.
Halbe Kuipers (ASCA)
This study is first and foremost a Nietzschean study of the morals of today. Not being able to see differently is at the heart of our problem as humans. It is to see the world merely in the image of the human: perception is shaped in its image, always subjecting the world to its limited perspective. Working across three modern political films, Episode III: Enjoy Poverty (2008), Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (2014), Stones Have Laws (2018), this project looks to see how images create other modes of existence. Through a philosophy of the image, the problems are opened beyond the human political sphere and become ones that are seen through direct perception.
Thom Westveer (ACLC)
In languages that display overt gender marking, such as French and German, superlative partitive constructions (e.g. the youngest of the students) can present a challenge with respect to gender agreement.
(1) La/Le plus jeune des nouveaux étudiants s’appelle Marie.
The .F/.M most young of the new.M.PL student.M.PL is called Marie
In a mixed group of females and males, group nouns are typically in the default masculine plural form (étudiants in (1)). If we select a female from this group, we could refer to her by using the feminine superlative form la plus jeune, but this results in a clash between the feminine superlative and the default masculine group noun étudiants. We could also use the masculine superlative form le plus jeune to refer to the female Marie, opting for agreement with the group noun’s grammatical gender, but then we are left with a masculine superlative that refers to a female, which is not that obvious either. The central aim of my PhD project is to further explore gender agreement in partitive constructions. I do not limit myself to French, but also investigate the same phenomenon in German, as this language presents similar agreement challenges.