5 September 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, procedures will most probably not be altered. However, make sure to check the guidelines as soon as the call 2025 is online.

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). Applications received after the deadline will not be considered.

For all candidates who will submit a proposal this year (or have submitted a proposal in the past), will have one submission opportunity left for a future PhD in the Humanities call. 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 (see caveat below). For this FdA internal selection each supervisor (intended applicant) can be connected to max. two candidates.

Applications should consist of:

• a full research proposal and CV written in English in the NWO-PhDs in the Humanities format (except for the data management section [4], abstract for non-specialists [7] and the budget form; 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.

Caveat: An awarded PhDs in the Humanities-project (with its duration of 4/5 years) will not be allowed to coexist with an NWO-Open Competition project M or L (i.e. one cannot be an applicant in both), nor can an applicant with an existing PhDs in the Humanities-project apply for a new one (unless it is nearing the end of the contract, for more details on this see the CfP). 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.