HREC Becomes a Partner of the Heritages of Hunger Project

HREC in 2019 became a partner on the project “Heritages of Hunger,” selected for funding by the Dutch Research Council (NWO – the national research council of the Netherlands). The five-year project, budgeted at 1.8 million Euro, will examine how commemorating and teaching about European famine legacies (at schools, heritage sites, museums, etc.) can create awareness of famines as heritages of shared experiences and past solidarity among European communities. The project was one of only nine selected for funding by NWO of more than 120 submissions, and the only in the humanities.  

Heritages of Hunger is headed by Prof. Marguerite Corporaal of Radboud University and the NIOD — Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies.  As a project partner, HREC will toward the end of the project organize a conference to examine project impact and to share lessons learned.

HREC’s participation as a partner on the project is a result of successful outreach. For its 2017 conference in Kyiv on colonialism and famine, HREC provided grants to support the attendance of early career scholars. Ingrid de Zwarte, then a PhD Candidate at the University of Amsterdam and the NIOD, was a recipient. (Her dissertation focuses on social responses and coping strategies during the Dutch famine of 1944-45. She has since been awarded a  postdoctoral fellowship by University of Oxford on hunger as a weapon in modern violent conflicts.) A year later, Ingrid wrote to invite HREC to be a partner on the proposal “Heritages of Hunger: Societal Reflections on Past European Famines in Education, Commemoration and Musealisation” which sought to investigate nine modern famines, including the Holodomor, in the context of curricula, commemorations and museums.