Corinne Hofman - Biography#
Corinne Hofman is professor of Caribbean Archaeology and director of the Caribbean Research Group at Leiden University, the largest of its kind worldwide. After obtaining a BA degree in art history and archaeology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (VUB), she completed her MA in pre-Columbian archaeology at Leiden University in 1987. Her MA research concentrated on the archaeology of Saba, Dutch Caribbean. Continuing her archaeological research on Saba during her PhD, she wrote her dissertation on the ceramic development of pre-Columbian Saba from a stylistic, morphological and technological perspective. Since then her focus in research and teaching is on the archaeology and indigenous history of the Caribbean.
Over the last three decennia Hofman has conducted fieldwork throughout the Caribbean which included excavations on Saba, St. Eustatius, St. Martin, Antigua (Long Island), Guadeloupe, Dominica, St. Lucia, Martinique, St. Vincent, Grenada, Curaçao, and the Dominican Republic. Her research is highly multi-disciplinary and her interests lie in settlement archaeology, artefact analyses, provenance studies, bioarchaeological investigations, network science, and ethnohistoric and ethnographic studies.
Since 1998, Hofman has obtained numerous prestigious research grants, amongst which an ASPASIA-grant (2003-2008) from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), a VIDI-grant (2004-2009), and a VICI-grant (2008-2013), both from the NWO Innovational Research Incentives Scheme. The main research themes pursued and developed throughout these multi-disciplinary projects are Socio-political Organisation, Settlement Patterns and Mobility and Exchange. Hofman’s projects are designed to contribute to the historical awareness and valorisation of archaeological heritage in the culturally and geopolitically diverse islandscape of the Caribbean.
In 2012 and 2013, Hofman was awarded a NWO open competition grant entitled “Island Networks: modeling inter-community social relationships in the Lesser Antilles across the historical divide (AD 1000-1800)”, an HERA (Humanities in the European Research Area) grant entitled “CARIB: Caribbean encounters in a New World Setting´ and the highly prestigious ERC Synergy grant “Nexus 1492: New World Encounters in a Globalising World”, http://www.nexus1492.eu
. The latter two projects are conducted in collaboration with Prof. dr. Gareth Davies (VU University, Amsterdam, Geochemistry), Prof. dr. Ulrik Brandes (University of Konstanz, Network Science), and Prof. dr. Patrick Degryse (KU, Leuven, Archaeometry). These projects focus on colonial encounters and inter-cultural dynamics in the late pre-colonial and early colonial Caribbean. Hofman has an extensive network of international collaborators, and over the years the Caribbean Research Group has generated large numbers of BA, MA, PhD and postdoctoral researchers. In 2013 Hofman was awarded the KNAW-Merian prize for Women in Science and in 2014 the Spinoza Prize which is the highest Dutch award in Science. She is member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences (KNAW) since 2015. Since September 2013 Hofman is Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology at Leiden University.
