Jury report Master and Research Master Thesis Award 2010

Jury report Master and Research Master Thesis Award 2010
Vrije Universiteit - Faculty of Arts
The jury entrusted by the board of the Faculty of Arts to allot the prizes for the best
MA theses of the past year received thirteen submissions. Four of these had served
as the final project of a Research Master programme, the other nine completed a
normal Master programme. As the average length of the theses was around a
hundred pages, the members of the jury spent many hours studying them.
Fortunately this exercise was compensated by the quality of the various theses, both
in terms of the presentation and the contents. The majority had been written in what
we experienced as near native English, those in which the Dutch language was used
testified to the linguistic competence which is expected at university level. As to the
contents, the jury could observe that in all cases the candidates had proved their
ability to perform good scholarly research. This was manifested in the formulation
of a significant problem, the gathering of relevant material and the handling of the
observations with well-chosen questions and hypotheses.
It is, however, the specific task of the jury to decide to which theses the faculty
prizes should be awarded. In the case of the regular Master theses one paper stood
out, but in view of the general quality of the other papers we felt that there was room
for an honourable mention of one of these. For this honour we finally chose the
survey of the role played by women in the process of changes in the Dutch Indies
during the first half of the twentieth century. The paper shows how focussing on
social emancipation rather than on political goals contributed in its own way to the
complicated process of changes. The jury was particularly impressed by the author’s
interpretation of relevant images in women’s magazines as an intrinsic part of the
social developments. For this reason we find that what might be called the ‘second
prize’ should be awarded to Adrienne Huijzer for her thesis ‘Escaping Kartini.
Indonesian women as agents in a changing colonial society, 1900-1942’.
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The jury held no doubts that the official prize of the faculty for a regular Master
thesis should be awarded to the author of a paper which also deals with the twentieth
century, in this case its second half in Europe. Many tend to think that in the
Deutsche Demokratische Republik the domain of the visual arts was entirely in the
hands of those who worked in accordance with the official guidelines for socialist
realism. In the thesis to which the jury wants to award the prize an entirely different
picture emerges. Private art galleries and individual artistic freedom competed with
government policy in the complicated world of Stasi infiltration on the one hand and
forms of connivance by the authorities on the other. All this is analyzed and
interpreted on the basis of a real treasury of primary evidence, gathered not only by
documents, but also in conversations with those who had taken part in the
‘unofficial’ art circuits. In her ‘Hunger nach Bildern, Gier nach Leben, Appetit auf
Veränderung’ Faby Bierhoff shows the reader ad oculos how autonomous forms of
art survived in their own way in a dictatorial society. This fine thesis fully deserves
the prize.
Awarding the prize to one of the four Research Master theses was definitely more
difficult. In fact, purely on its own merits each of them deserved the prize. This is,
however, awarded as a result of a comparison between the competitors. In this case
too the jury wanted to allot a ‘second prize’, namely to a paper in which the growing
interest in historical research of the so-called ‘collective memory’ has materialized
in a meritorious manner. The paper deals with the difficult and even painful relations
to the Dutch colonial past in the East Indies. Having sketched the scholarly and
theoretical framework within which he developed his research, the author deals with
four representative cases, in which the problems of shared reminiscences, but
divergent judgments of historical facts are convincingly analyzed and interpreted.
Daan de Lange has done a fine job with his paper ‘Een spiegelende oppervlakte’.
The jury finally concluded that the prize for the best Research Master thesis should
be awarded to a paper which deals with community structures many ages ago in a
period which has not left any written document. The paper is mainly concerned with
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remains of settlements of the seventh and sixth millennium B.C. in the region of the
sea of Marmora and possible contacts with comparable settlements in Anatolia or
Thrace. Its author first offers a thoughtful and extensive exposition of the theoretical
framework within which she performs her specific research. Her first and foremost
concern consists in understanding ‘households and inter-household relationships’,
which are not static, but involved in changes. This inspires archaeologists ‘to come
up with social interpretations of the past’, for ‘culture cannot be equated with styles
of pots’. The author then introduces the material results of professional excavations
in the interested regions and her own interpretations of these results. What
impressed the jury was her sustained focus on the possibility of hypotheses about the
social role of the household and its ‘changing relationships’. This remarkable
synthesis of archaeological fieldwork and fruitful hypotheses about social structures
in a thesis in the Faculty of Arts gained the jury’s unanimous decision of the first
prize to Elisha van den Bos for the thesis ‘Beyond dots on a map’.
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