Utrecht University students win KHMW Jan Brouwer Thesis Prizes 2024
Oana Ciuraru (a former student of Dutch Literature and Culture) and Tara Tankink (Public Administration and Organisational Science) both win a Jan Brouwer Thesis Award from the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (KHMW). Ciuraru receives the award for her research on ‘petroculture’ in early-twentieth-century literature and Tankink explored the impact of invisible disabilities on students.
“Burningly topical and directional”
Oana Ciuraru wins the Jan Brouwer Thesis Prize for Language and Literary Studies for her thesis ‘Rubiks kubus: Een onderzoek naar de Nederlandse petrocultuur uit het interbellum’ (‘Rubik’s Cube: An Investigation into Dutch Petroculture of the Interwar Period’). Using Dutch and Romanian source corpora, Ciuraru describes how modernist literature from the 1920s and 1930s reflects the increasingly central importance of oil extraction.
“A century later, this thematisation of ‘petroculture’ is naturally much more heavily charged, politically and ecologically, and takes on unsuspected contemporary resonances,” the jury writes in its report. Ciuraru’s thesis is therefore “burningly topical”, the jury thinks, and her transnational approach is “directional for contemporary Dutch Studies”. “It connects the historical method with the contemporary theorisation of ‘eco-criticism’.”
“Immediately applicable recommendations”
The thesis ‘Ableism at University: Experiencing Student Life with an Invisible Disability’ earned Tara Tankink the Jan Brouwer Thesis Award for Political Science and Public Administration. Tankink focuses on the experiences of students with invisible disabilities, such as mental vulnerabilities, and examines how students perceive the way the university deals with these.
The jury called Tankink’s thesis “convincing” and “creative” and praised her commitment. “The student really cares about the subject and manages to conduct strong research from a personal involvement and to guard the scientificity by reflecting on this involvement.” According to the jury, her research offers a “very clear and concealing insight into a world of experience that many people do not know” and finds Tankink’s recommendations highly relevant and directly applicable to universities.