Seven NWO Open Competition grants for UU Humanities scholars

Seven Utrecht University Humanities scholars have been awarded a grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the Open Competition SGW programme. With this competition, the NWO Division for Social Sciences and Humanities wants to offer researchers the opportunity to carry out research on a subject of their own choice, without any thematic preconditions. A new historical reconstruction of Libya. In the context of limited scholarship on Libya's past - whose main focus being Qadhafi and the oil industry - the role played by the desert has received little attention, despite its importance. Roberta Biasillo's project aims to test whether it is possible to decentre political-economy approaches and propose a global history of Modern Libya based on its main ecological feature, Libyan desert which encompasses 95% of the country's surface area. Did this environmental challenge, halt, or boost colonization, economic development, state formation and state collapse? Can a desert-focussed analysis of Libyan history offer an alternative narrative for the modern era? -   - Project title: The Shifting Sands of Libya: A Global History of a Desert in Modern Times The first political history of Belgian colonialism. Frank Gerits' project will make the innovative and highly speculative claim that Belgian elites and politicians from the independence of the Belgian state in 1830 onwards harboured the ambition to become an imperial superpower.