We are very pleased to announce that two of our professors, Karin Bijsterveld and Leonie Cornips, and their PhD candidates Linnea Semmerling (M.A.) and Nantke Pecht (M.A.) have been successful within the funding programme PhDs in the Humanities from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Bijsterveld and Cornips have each received € 214,170 from NWO to start two PhD projects.
1. Listening on Display: Exhibiting Sound Art, 1960s-now
Prof. dr. K.Th. Bijsterveld & Dr. Peter Peters – PhD candidate Linnea Semmerling (M.A.)
This project examines how the rise of sound art in art museums in Germany and the United States (1960-now) has challenged existing curatorial strategies by asking the following sub-questions: What aesthetic-experiential and technological challenges have artists felt faced with when positioning their sound works in a museum context? How have curators dealt with artists’ conceptions of sound art, the everyday reality of the museum, and the technologies available? How have museum visitors experienced and evaluated sound art works? How can the answers to these questions inform new curatorial strategies for displaying sound art?
2. Speaking Cité Duits in a coalminers’ neighborhood: The construction and reproduction of social identities through language practices
Prof. dr. Leonie Cornips & Peter Auer (Universiteit Freiburg) – PhD candidate Nantke Pecht (M.A.)
The project will examine how language practices are employed to construct and reproduce social identities among speakers of the former coalminers’ community of Tuinwijk (also called the Cité) in Maasmechelen, Eisden (Belgium). The miners display a German-Dutch-Limburgian-dialect way of speaking which they call Cité Duits but with several linguistic features that occur in none of the three varieties. The aim is to develop an informed and detailed description and linguistic analysis of Cité Duits, as well as an interpretation of its use by former miners and (possibly) their sisters and wives in Eisden, and of former miners who have emigrated in the 1960s to the U.S. (Santa Rosa Valley, California) and have been exposed to a further contact language, i.e. English.
Both PhD candidates will start in the near future.
