Professor of Caribbean Archaeology at Leiden University, Corinne L. Hofman, is the Dean of the Faculty of Archaeology since 2013 ánd the director of the Caribbean Research Group at Leiden University, the largest of its kind worldwide. Her research and publications are highly multi-disciplinary. Major themes of interest center around mobility and exchange, colonial encounters, inter-cultural dynamics, settlement archaeology, artefact analyses and provenance studies. Hofman’s projects are designed to contribute to the historical awareness and valorisation of archaeological heritage of archaeological heritage in the culturally and geopolitically diverse islandscape of the Caribbean.
Last February she won the Distinguished Lorentz Fellowship 2018/19 for her research into the changing world of indigenous peoples as a result of colonialism. The fellowship set up by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS-KNAW) and the Lorentz Center Leiden, will allow her to carry out a comparative study into the impacts of colonial encounters on indigenous communities. To this end, she will look not only at the Amerindian peoples of the Caribbean, her own field of expertise, but also at indigenous communities in West Africa and the Pacific. “The perspective of indigenous communities is still lacking in most history books," says Hofman. >> Read more on this research and the fellowship.
Moreover, Hofman and her colleagues wrote an article entitled ‘Indigenous knowledge was key to the European colonisation of the Americas’ that was published in the archaeology journal ‘Antiquity’. The research ascertains that the colonisation of the American continent started at the end of the 15th century when Columbus conquered large parts of the Caribbean. 'This region was the port of entry to the rest of the Americas,' Leiden Professor of Caribbean Archaeology Corinne Hofman explains. But the history of the colonisation of the American continent has largely overlooked the role of the region's original Amerindian population. >> Read more on this research.
On March 1st Hofman was also interviewed for an article in ‘Volkskrant’ (in Dutch) on the commotion regarding the theme of a Wild West Children’s party in Utrecht, informing us with her expertise on Indians and Colonisation of the American continent.
Last but not least Corinne Hofman is also among the fourteen women professors whose portraits are unveiled on International Women’s day in the classic portrait gallery of Leiden University’s Senate Chamber by former Minister of Education, Culture and Science Jet Bussemaker and Rector Magnificus Carel Stolker. These fourteen women were nominated by the seven Deans of Leiden University for the pioneering research they have all conducted in their field. >> Read more about this unveiling.