01-09-2026

Last summer, Ramona Négron and Sander van der Horst received funding through the new travel grant programme of the KNAW Humanities Fund, which supports and promotes research in the humanities. Yvette Ruzibiza received a € 10,000 bursary from the KNAW Trailblazers Fund, which supports young first-generation scholars in taking the next step in their academic careers.

The grant gives Ramona the opportunity to develop a research project and expand her research on the history of Dutch slavery to Bonaire. Ramona will spend a month working at the National Archives of Curaçao in Willemstad. There, she will catalogue and digitise nineteenth-century registers, reports, and other government documents concerning enslaved people in Bonaire who were owned by the Dutch state. Ramona will process the data into a searchable dataset, which will be made freely available in collaboration with the Historical Database of Suriname and the Caribbean. Read more.

Sander will use the grant for a ten-week research stay in Japan. In the archives of Gensuikyo in Tokyo and at memorial centres in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Sander will investigate the forgotten alliances between Japanese and Indonesian anti-nuclear activists during the early Cold War, as well as the ways in which these groups thought about denuclearisation and decolonisation. Read more.

Yvette aims to explore issues affecting millions of people in East Africa, specifically who is displaced when governments strike deals with private corporations for forest-offset projects, and who makes those decisions. With the grant, Yvette is planning a six-month research stay in Austria, where expert mentorship will help her develop a research grant proposal on this topic. Read more.