Two NWO Open Competition grants for Utrecht Humanities scholars
Ozan Ozavci and Elena Tribushinina have been awarded a grant by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the Open Competition SSH 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.
More effective and sustainable north-south cooperation systems
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the inadequacy of health cooperation between the global north and south has had dire and lethal consequences for humanity. And yet we still have limited knowledge as to how we can establish effective and durable north-south cooperation systems without paving pathways to foreign domination and nationalist backlashes.
To address this pressing problem, Ozan Ozavci will turn to the guidance of the past. Ozavci will write a new history of the first and longest-lasting institutions of global health cooperation: the international sanitary councils in the Middle East and North Africa.
- Researcher: Dr Ozan Ozavci
- Project title: The Great Game of Pandemics: Sanitary Internationalism in the Middle East and North Africa, 1792-1942
- Affiliated with: Department of History and Art History
Why does bilingualism offer advantages in foreign language learning?
Bilingual pupils often perform better in English and other foreign languages compared to their monolingual peers. This holds for typically-developing children and pupils with developmental language disorder (DLD). But the underlying causes of the bilingual advantages are possibly different for children with and without DLD.
In this project, Elena Tribushinina aims to discover why bilingualism offers benefits in foreign language learning. To this end, learners’ progress in English is studied in relation to the development of their cognitive skills, motivation and proficiency in the school language (Dutch) and the home language (Turkish or Polish).
- Researcher: dr. Elena Tribushinina
- Project title: One Plus One Is More than Two: Why Are Bilingual Children More Successful in Learning Foreign Languages at School?
- Affiliated with: Department of Languages, Literature and Communication