Nominees 2011 History Thesis Award

The award is issued every year to students who wrote an excellent thesis about a historical topic. The winner will be announced at 8 December 2011.

The nominees are:

• Michel van Duijnen, 'The stepchildren of the Balkans': how nationalism affected the Dutch press coverage of Kosovo and Macedonia during the break up of Yugoslavia, 1991-1995
  Central to this research is the question of how nationalism influenced the reporting on Kosovo and Macedonia in 1991-1995. On the one hand nationalism is approached as an ideology and a political program, but on the other hand it is taken as an implicit basis and framework for judgment by journalists.
• Boyd van Dijk, Leven in de schaduw van een kamp. Konzentrationslager Herzogenbusch in Vught. 1942 - 1944
  This work deals with a relatively new aspect in the historiography of holocaust studies, namely, the bystanders. Instead of focusing on the perpetrators, Van Dijk broadly investigates the bystanders of Camp Vught. He shows the dilemmas of the onlookers and places them in the specific context of Vught.
• Joppe van Driel, Enlightening the matter of science – The anti-materialistic Enlightenment philosophy of Jean de Castillon (1709-1791)
  Joppe van Driel criticizes two central assumptions in the development and institutionalization of the concept of science during the enlightenment. He demonstrates that in the second part of the 18th century the concept of science was still being developed and that the institutionalization of the concept did not proceed according to existing patterns that were considered the norm for the enlightenment. He also criticizes Jonathan Israels’ dichotomy of a radical and conservative enlightenment.

The presentation takes place at the International Institute of Social History.