14 July 2022

Each year the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities (Koninklijke Hollandsche Maatschappij der Wetenschappen, short: KHMW) awards the Jan Brouwer Thesis Prizes in eight scientific/scholarly fields. (As of 7 July, registration for the Jan Brouwer Thesis Prizes 2023 has been opened. Five of the price categories are relevant to the Faculty of Humanities: History, Religious Studies, Philosophy, Linguistics and Literature, and Social Sciences (in a narrow sense). The prizes are intended for master's theses completed in the 2021/2022 academic year. There is an amount of € 2000 per prize involved.

Nomination for the prizes is bound to a number of conditions, formulated by the KHMW. This means  that theses can only be submitted by the faculty, if necessary after a faculty selection round. The KHMW conditions are:

• Per category a faculty may nominate a maximum of three theses.
• When a faculty nominates two or three theses within a category, at least one of the theses  must be written by a female student.
• The KHMW only accepts theses submitted by the faculty. Please note: theses that are individually nominated by staff members will not be considered by the jury.

Would you like to nominate a thesis?

If you would like to nominate a thesis in one of the categories relevant to the Faculty of Humanities, please notify Job Weststrate of the department Policy and Management Support – Educational Advice and Quality Assurance (Dutch abbreviation: BBO/O&K) at the latest on Monday 19 September at 5:00 pm, per email to oenk@hum.leidenuniv.nl. Please indicate in which category you would like the thesis to compete. If more than three nominations are submitted in a category, the faculty will make a selection based on the judgment of a small selection committee formed for that purpose. That committee will consist of staff members with relevant expertise. Staff members who nominate a thesis do not have a seat on the selection committee. You may receive a reminder about the price of the KHMW after September 19, but it will then no longer be possible to submit.

For selection the following is required:

1. a digital version of the nominated master's thesis,
2. the written assessment of the thesis, i.e. the thesis assessment form,
3. a (short) curriculum vitae of the nominee and a transcript of grades of his/her master's degree,
4. as much additional information that may be relevant for the award of the prize (for example, the direct social impact of the thesis research, or a particularly complex context in which source research had to be carried out, etc.).

A letter of recommendation from the thesis supervisor/lecturer is only required if the thesis is selected for nomination by the faculty.

When the selection is completed, BBO/O&K will do the nomination on behalf of the faculty via the online form on the Jan Brouwer Thesis Award site. Again only theses that are nominated via the faculty will be considered by the KHMW