Atlantic travel was an important part of life within the Dutch-Surinamese colonial system. How time was experienced on board, however, has been neglected in research. Knowing this will help us understand what happened to Surinamese and Dutch travellers during these momentous weeks of their lives, as well as travel’s impact on colony and ‘motherland’. Branching out from Anton de Kom’s decisive 1932 journey, I will experiment with the cutting-edge method of critical fabulation to reconstruct the on-board experiences not only of De Kom but of a stoker and a woman – a nurse? – almost completely missing from the archives.

Language and culture students experience the problem that they cannot gain teaching experience early in their undergraduate education. Because students gain teaching experience too late, or not at all, they miss an important part of their personal and professional development. They should be able to learn about learning, and to discover their talents and interests, earlier. In this innovation project, we develop a meet-and-read module in which university students read literature together with high school students using the shared reading method, so university students gain teaching experience earlier and high school students are introduced to language and culture studies.

Ever since Plato, thinkers have asked what fiction does in society. Does reading fiction make people more empathic, or help them work through trauma? Does fiction contribute to citizenship and community-building? Although philosophers and literary theorists have long debated these questions, there are few historical sources to test their hypotheses. New methods are therefore needed to make the sources we do have, such as library lending records or catalogues of private libraries, speak to us. In this project, a team of cultural historians will develop innovative computational methods to understand relations between fiction and citizenship in eighteenth-century, revolutionary Europe.

Europe’s recent crises have sparked Euro-scepticism and anti-immigration sentiments. Heritages of Hunger aimed to overcome divisions by reassessing education about famines (1845-1947) and developing resources to strengthen trans-European heritage consciousness. The project, led by Radboud University, Wageningen University & Research and NIOD, investigated famine legacies in textbooks, museums, and commemorations, highlighting resilience and transnational solidarity. It created educational modules, a digital exhibition, and a database of famine legacies. Surveys and interviews with educators informed the development of resources to foster historical empathy and transnational identities. The project culminated in policy recommendations and tested educational materials.