Research Prize for Christophe van Eecke

Christophe van Eecke has been awarded one of the five Research Prizes from the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation for his PhD dissertation titled ‘Pandaemonium: Ken Russell’s Artist Biographies as Baroque Performance’. He defended that dissertation at Maastricht University in November 2015. The prize comes with a €3,000 grant and a certificate.

Since 1988, the Praemium Erasmianum Foundation has awarded up to five Research Prizes each year to young researchers in the humanities and social sciences who have defended PhD dissertations of particularly high quality at a Dutch university. The relevant faculties nominate candidates.

Van Eecke’s dissertation is an inquiry into a particular form of self-representation: the creation of a (public) self through works of art. The subject of the research is the British filmmaker Ken Russell (1927–2011), who is best known for a wide range of biographical films about the lives of artists, primarily composers. However Russell claimed that those films were actually a kind of self-portrait. The hypothesis underlying the research is that Russell is a Baroque artist and that his approach to biography and self-creation is a typical Baroque phenomenon.

Christophe van Eecke earned his doctorate from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences on 5 November 2015. The 2016 Research Prizes will be presented at a festive award ceremony at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences on Monday, 9 May. 

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