5 September 2024

Updated on October 17, 2024

The Faculty of Archaeology will participate in the PhDs in the Humanities grant program 2025. The official call will be published by NWO in November/December. The 2024 NWO PhD in Humanities information is helpful. However, NWO has notified the universities already that in this year’s submission also an impact section will be required. Make sure to check the guidelines as soon as the call 2025 is online (expected in week 43).

Procedure

Only applications that are selected by both the Faculty Boards of FdA (Archaeology) and FGW (Humanities) are allowed to submit to NWO. The proposals will therefore be assessed in two selection phases at Leiden University:

1) Pre-selection Faculty of Archaeology early December 2024:

The FdA Research Committee assesses and ranks the proposals on behalf of the Board. The Research Committee will determine the ‘top three’ that will continue to the next selection phase.

2) Selection Archaeology/Humanities early January 2024: 

The selected ones from FdA can incorporate feedback and will then have to resubmit in the second week of January 2025. From all the pre-selected Archaeology and Humanities proposals (14 in total) a Humanities/Archaeology Committee will subsequently determine the five (of which max. 2 FdA candidates) who will be allowed to submit to NWO on behalf of Leiden University. The NWO deadline will probably be in the last week of February/first week March 2025.

Deadline

Deadline for the pre-selection phase by the Faculty of Archaeology is Thursday the 7^th of November, 2024: 11.59 a.m. Send your application to researchcommittee@arch.leidenuniv.nl. The Research Committee will only assess applications that are conform the NWO-PhDs in the Humanities format and guidelines (see here under the tab ‘prepare’, and see further below for some exceptions and addition). Applications received after the deadline will not be considered.

For all candidates who will submit a proposal this year (or has submitted a proposal in the past), will have one submission opportunity left for a next round. From next year on every new candidate will have a maximum of two submission opportunities. Note that the supervisor or promotor will ultimately have to submit the application and, hence, will be the formal applicant. For this FdA internal selection each supervisor (intended applicant) can be connected to max. two candidates. In the rare case that two FdA applications with the same supervisor are selected to ultimately submit to NWO one of the applications will have to change applicant.   

The limitation in previous rounds that an awarded NWO-PhDs in the Humanities-project would not be allowed to coexist with an NWO-Open Competition project M or L (i.e. one could not be an applicant in both) has been dropped by NWO for the 2025 round.

FdA applications should consist of:

• a research proposal and CV written in English in the NWO-PhDs in the Humanities 2025 format. Compared to the 2024 format, in 2025 Section 3 (research idea) will have a max. of 3000 words, of which 750 words as Impact section. In the 2025 PhDs In the Humanities programme, the Impact Outlook approach will be used. With this approach, candidates may choose which type of impact they want to focus on, and the possibilities for the other type(s) of impact are considered accordingly. The data management section, abstract for non-specialists and the budget form are not yet required; these will be needed for the next phase for those who will be selected.
• email (Dutch or English) of supervisor and promotor (albeit in CC) declaring willingness to support candidate & project.