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Last week, the Faculty of Humanities presented the awards for the best Master’s and Research Master’s theses. This year, Estel van den Berg and Charlotte Graafland took home the honours.

Museums’ responsibility in the climate crisis

Sadie Nyman McKnight (MA Cultural History and Heritage) received the award for the best Master’s thesis for her Food for Thought in Museums: Delay Discourses in Exhibitions about Food 1989-2024, supervised by Gertjan Plets. In her thesis, she examines museum exhibitions about the ‘future of food’ and identifies widespread ‘delay discourses’.

“These are strategies that, often unintentionally, obstruct necessary action or justify climate inaction, despite increasing awareness of the urgent need to tackle the climate crisis and recognition that the food system is implicated,” Nyman McKnight explains. “My research highlights the potential of exhibitions to examine and contribute to the shaping of public environmental perceptions and how this relates to the role and responsibility of museums.”

Urgency and Relevance Are Clear

“The thesis demonstrates that museums and exhibitions play a role in both raising awareness about climate action and in transmitting narratives that ultimately impede the progress toward less CO2-intensive food production,” the jury writes. “The urgency and social relevance of the thesis is abundantly clear, and the criticism of the influence that Big Agriculture has on dominant narratives about food is unmistakable.”

“I am very honored to receive the award,” Nyman McKnight responds, “as I really enjoyed the experience of researching this fascinating topic. I am very grateful to everyone who helped me to develop the thesis, and I hope that the conceptual framework I utilised could potentially be developed in further research.”

The search for a nameless master

How do you research a painter whose name has been lost to history? Sjors Nab (RMA Art History) won the award for the best Research Master’s thesis with The Master of the Legend of Saint Lucy, supervised by Daantje Meuwissen. This anonymous master, active in Bruges at the end of the fifteenth century, worked for patrons from what is now Latvia to Spain. Yet he was often overshadowed by more famous contemporaries or dismissed as a mere copyist.

“By gathering X-rays, infrared images, and other techniques from museums and heritage institutions around the world, I was literally able to look beneath the paint and reconstruct his painting techniques step by step,” Nab explains. “This revealed how this unknown master worked 450 years ago: hesitant in some compositions, decisive in others. Gradually, his own character reemerged, and I hope to have created a framework through which other forgotten masters might also be brought back to life.”

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“This thesis can be characterized by one word: craftsmanship,” the jury notes. They describe the study as professional, careful, thorough, and skilful, and expect that few changes would be needed to render this work publishable. “With this thesis, Sjors provides a new insight into the work of a specific painter. However, the importance of his study goes beyond that, because his approach within technical art history can also be applied to other oeuvres.”

“It is a wonderful recognition, not just for me, but for everyone who supported and helped me,” Nab says. “Alongside the guidance of my brilliant supervisor, Daantje Meuwissen, the collaboration with museums and heritage institutions was crucial to my research. In the international art-historical and humanities world, which is under pressure, they still took the time to make my research possible, for which I am profoundly grateful.”